Green-Trust.Org

Cob is an ancient and simple building material. Made of soil, sand, straw and water, it can last for decades, sometimes centuries, and is an inexpensive, local, green building material.

The Cob Builders Handbook says,

“The three most common forms of earth buildings are adobe, rammed earth and cob. In the southwestern United States, the five hundred year old Taos Pueblo, as well as many homes and churches, are made of adobe. Adobe is a form of building using unfired earth. Dirt, straw and water – the same ingredients as in cob – are made into bricks which are then sun dried and built into walls with a “cob-like” mortar. Some very old Native American structures like the Casa Grande ruin in Arizona are made out of cob. These are described locally as being built of “puddled or coursed adobe”.”

This spring, Green-Trust will be building a generator and wood boiler shed with cob, in preparation for building a few homes as well.

Resources:

http://beckybee.net/
http://weblife.org/cob/index.html
http://www.housealive.org/
http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/cob.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_%28material%29
http://www.cobcottage.com/

The 13th annual North Country Sustainable Energy Fair, upstate New York’s largest and longest running community energy fair, is April 25-27, 2008 at the SUNY Canton Campus Center, Canton, NY. Last year thousands of people attended the Fair from as far away as Rochester, Ithaca, Buffalo, Canada and New England.

This year, by popular request, the Fair will expand to both Saturday and Sunday, and will be our most varied and in depth so far.

http://www.ncenergy.org/2008/

Steve Spence and Jim Juczak will be presenting a workshop on Building your own Wind Turbine, and Steve will be presenting on Installing your own Solar Power System.

A reader on our 12v group brought up this topic, and it started the idea engine. There were a few models available in the past, of lawn and garden tractors, that used electric motors instead of fuel driven engines. Quieter, easier on the environment and your lungs, and arguably, on your wallet, it’s apparent that they are attempting a comeback. Appropriate on a off-grid homestead like ours, we are researching the availability, and possibility of converting our Sears mower to electric. See the following resources:

http://www.electrictractor.com

http://electriclawntractor.com

http://www.modernelectrictractors.com/

Please let me know if you find more of these units available or even DIY conversions.

We have a new feature on our website. A series of environmentally focused videos can be found on the lower right side of this post and other articles on this website. Also check out the discussion topics to the right of this post. Hope you enjoy.

Our guide to installing your own power system is finished, and available on our eBook page at http://www.green-trust.org/ebooks/

Covering Sizing, siting, installation, and battery maintenance, it’s a good guide to putting together your own inexpensive system. Includes private discussion group and free updates.

So, the trip to Anguilla wasn’t all work. We had a week of swimming, hiking, exploring the rocky coast and beaches, meeting new people, music festivals and sailing races. The pics show what a wonderful place Anguilla is.

We just got back from our trip to Anguilla. We helped Francoise set up her new solar power system. Two Kyocera 130 watt PV panels, a Xantrex C35 charge controller, a Trimetric Battery Meter, a Morningstar Microsine 300 sine wave inverter, and a 70 ah AGM battery, power up 3 Compact Fluorescent Lights, A LG WP-680N Washing Machine (260 Watts) and a Shurflo 12v pump. Two weeks of testing, and we were never able to pull the battery below 12.4 volts. The system consistently output 1.5 kWh’s daily. More pics at http://www.green-trust.org/Anguilla Solar/.

Recycline’s New Preserve® Razor Triple is made from Recycled Materials and is Recyclable

My son really likes this one. His is red, looks racy, and keeps his teenage chin whisker free. They grow up so fast.

Waltham, MA (October 17, 2006) – Recycline is proving once again that high-performance consumer products used every day can be designed with an environmental edge. The Preserve Razor Triple is the latest addition to the Preserve brand, which already includes the top-selling toothbrush, razor and plastic tableware in the natural product marketplace. This new razor is the first environment-friendly alternative for high-performance shaving products. “The razor category in the natural channel has been void of a high performance offering and consumers and retailers have been asking for an environment-friendly and high-performance alternative,” says Recycline President and founder Eric Hudson.