Green-Trust.Org

From Kinetic’s web site:

This is MAX, which stands for Mother’s Automotive eXperiment. No, we’re not done with it. It needs a streamlined body, for one thing, since we’re shooting for 100 miles per gallon. The engine is a turbocharged 1100cc Kubota diesel, and and even sans streamlining MAX is surprisingly peppy. Peppy enough to win the inaugural Escape from Berkeley race in October ‘08 (Berkeley to Las Vegas without petroleum fuel) thanks to good performance, great mileage, and the ability to run on cooking oil straight out of the bottle. We intend to run the same team this year, when Escape from Berkeley takes us from Berkeley to Mexico; Yours Truly behind the wheel and Sharon Wescott behind the map…unless by some fluke we get a diesel motorcycle whipped together for Sharon, in which case we’ll be calling for volunteers in the right seat.

http://kineticvehicles.com/

More references:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Transportation/100-MPG-Car.aspx
http://www.locostusa.com/
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Locost_North_America/

We drove to Massachusetts yesterday to visit Tom Leue from http://yellowbiodiesel.com/, and brought back one of his Recycled Vegetable Oil (RVO) burners. This is designed to replace a standard 4″ Beckett burner in a boiler or furnace, can be installed in a drum for a shop heater, used to heat water, or even create steam for a steam engine powered heat and electric application (Combined heat and power, or CHP). We talked a bit a few days ago about this burner in a previous blog article, which gives more info on the burner itself. This design is based on a Babington burner that injects air through a tiny jet in a ball, and pumps oil over the ball, forming a ignitable vapor when the oil covers the jet of air, similar to a whale’s blowhole. Discussions of the Babington principle are commonly held at http://group.wastewatts.org.

Convert your gasoline generator to clean burning propane. We document the steps, and it’s a easy 45 minute process. See http://www.green-trust.org/ebooks/ for details

Now that Dharam’s fuel tank is ready to be reinstalled, we are wrapping it in two layers of Reflectix to keep the heat in the tank. New mounting brackets are being welded on the bus, and the tank, fuel filter and the lines will be hooked up today.

Tomorrow we are pouring the concrete pads for the wind tower, and remounting the PV panels on the south side of our newly repainted home. Dharam did a great job spraying and rolling the new paint.