A little "Vacation" instead of Conservation...

I have been promising to write that article about window energy savings in the warm climates, but it is going to have to wait a little longer. I have been redesigning a website, with new software to boot, and it takes a ridiculous amount of time. This writing being a hobby while work being necessary to my existence, it takes precedence. This is not about my work, which I am going to keep private. It is about what I have been reading about a lot with envy, as I have not been able to take a vacation myself for quite a while.

I started by reading about Belize, which is formerly British Honduras. It is a tiny country off the boot of Mexico. It doesn't get the publicity of Costa Rica in Central America, and here is why: There are only 250,000 people in the whole country! I keep thinking about going there for a year to write, as they do speak english there, and I thought that would be convenient. But I heard it is hard to change the money there-they love american hard currency and hate to see it leave the country. It should be a great place to go, but I don't think that it is as polished a vacation destination as is Costa Rica. I had two young girlfriends go there for several weeks a couple of years ago, and they found it to be incredibly beautiful and interesting, and more importantly, safe. They are very attractive young gals, and they experienced no problems whatsoever. After they came back with their photo albums and stories, I talked to a buddy of mine about renting a Costa Rica Vacation Home for a few weeks just to see what it would be like to be there. Unfortunately, the wifey wouldn't hear of it-of course, she wasn't invited, so that might have had something to do with it. All the pretty ticas-as Costa Rican girls are known-and I would have to worry about being protected from them by a hen thinking she was doing me a favor! This is also a great place to visit if you are an eco-tourist; the girls told me that if you don't believe in conservation by the time you leave there, you have lived in the city for far too long.

Costa Rica is not the only the destination I have been preoccupied with-every time I see "Captain Blood" or The Princess and the Pirate with Bob Hope, I think about life in the Bahamas in the 1700's, when Rum was king, and the pirates were the terror of the Spanish Main, if that is where that is. Anyway, there are some incredibly beautiful islands in the Carribean, and I can't wait to take a little trip to this area. I deserve a vacation a lot, and I wish I hadn't bought a house last fall; it seems like it owns you more than the other way around. I keep thinking about renting a house in the Bahamas, and just take a month off, get brown, concoct sweet rum drinks, and watch the bluest of blue water beyond the whitest of white sand. I am so tired of desert brown sand in Arizona, as much as I like it here.

The best us Arizonans get for exotic locations is finding a nice Mexican beach villa in Cabo San Lucas, wait for Ted Nugent to show up and poor you a Cabo Wabbler with countless other Americans escaping their life in the real world. Cabo is an easy "get-to" to from all points on the west coast, and they do know how to treat americans there, from everyone I've met that's been there. It is what people say it is: a great big party.

If you guys got any further suggestions on places i should be thinking about visiting I am all ears. I am going to start planning for something this fall, and I need a break. I have even been brushing up on my Spanish with Rosetta Stone.
They have a great learning module on their website you can try out. It does work. Contrary to popular belief, you need to know more than Cerveza, por favor! in Latin America.

-Desert Viking
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Words to Live Greener By 9/14/07

this is the second installment of words to live greener by. I hope that I do find some interesting topics for you to discover around the net. Once I have a enough to make a page, I will post it. If you have any interesting obscure topics, please post them by all means. (I am posting this a bit early this week, as I am occupied this evening and tomorrow morning, so the date is not wrong it is just early.)

If we don't do more to save the outdoors, there won't be anything left to save. Join the Sierra Club.

I am not a raging wildlife conservationist, but I do have a lot of sympathy for the polar bear, whose world seems to be disapearing as we go through our current climate fluctuation. I am not completely sold on the idea of all global warming is caused by man-there are fluctuations that occur in nature-but a lot of what we do as humans certainly can't be helping it. I am not sure what good this petition ultimately does, but it shows someone cares.

Your words today are:

Biomass
Nanocrystals
P-Series alternative fuel
desalination
WaterSense
ocean thermal energy conversion
Smog Hog

Enter your search terms Submit search form

Salt Water the newest Green Fuel?

This is interesting...apparently someone figured out how to extract the energy from salt water, our "most abundant resource" by applying radio waves. Check out the article at breitbart here....

Explore, enjoy and protect the planet

This is an article on treehugger from today. Water conservation is an important topic, and while I don't agree with everything ultra-conservationists preach, we can all learn something from each other. This is a great article because it addresses good practices we can all take advantage of. I wish I had written it first, so Kudos to the author, and as I have a special place in my heart for authors, she will get her name mentioned here as well. Jasmin Malik Chua. Great article, Jasmin.

Find out how you can save water and energy with Tankless Water Heaters. Tankless water heaters are the future, people. Europe doesn't even allow tank heaters, as I understand it.


This is an interesting article about advances in solar power. Solar power is eventually going to change the way we live.

Hypocrisy-"Gulfstream Gore" style

I have an honest question for those of you who reside a little more left of me on the political spectrum. I see that the Drudge Report has posted an article with a picture of Al Gore getting on a private jet. My question is: Do you think it is okay for your leaders to do one thing and preach another? This is such hypocrisy...Larry Craig type hypocrisy, if he is actually a deviate. I don't mean gay, I mean a deviate. If he is gay, so what? But trying to get him some in the bathroom makes him a deviate, gay or straight. Assuming he is, let's compare this with Al Gore's jet-setting. Craig is being shown the door for his probable hypocrisy, not for his pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanor. How you can think of Al Gore as a leader on Climate change when he jets around privately, creating more carbon in one trip than any SUV driver does in a month. Why is this the lasting image I have of the democratic party? That you will follow wolves in sheeps clothing? He is not living the life that he preaches at me to embrace. Why in the world should I believe anything he says? He is still living the Good Life. This is not taunting, I really want to know. Tell me how he has credibility with you whose hearts and actions are in the right place. I can't see the appeal of a monumental phony like that.

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New feature: Words to live Greener by.

Okay,

I am back in a semi-transparent, ghostly kind of way, and I have a new feature that I want to try. I hope you will find it interesting. First though, note the words I used "Words to live Greener", not green. We are real consumers, and we do stuff that is not green, and we all will continue to do so. We can do some things, conveniently, that will help though, and my little bailiwick I am attempting to create addresses those tactics. I am not an enviro-expert, I am just going to use common sense, mostly. I think greener is a more accurate word than green, so there I am, being realistic again, not altruistic.

Okay, to the feature: I am going to post a weekly list of words that I think should interest us all in finding more about, and then I want you to look it up. I will try to make that easy for you, sometimes I will post links, but I think you can find search engines easily on your own. I think that will be very cool, as there are a lot of words we hear, that we would say we know about, but if someone asked you the details, you wouldn't have a clue. We say we are familiar, but our knowledge of the topic is shallow, at best. I think it is that way, especially in energy tech, so I am going to post some words and topics you might find vaguely familiar, but uninformed about. Learning is supposed to be fun, and maybe you will change your climate destroying existence, and the Green Weenies will allow you to live on their precious planet without torching your house or SUV. Having some of this knowledge will no doubt save you some embarrassment when you are at a dinner party with "real" conservationists. You can tell them you know all about Tankless water heaters, and Low-E Windows, and even about Geo-thermal strategies for the home.

These are not always going to be conservation words; I will try to make it about that mostly, but I will put up some fun stuff, as I run across it, that I think is interesting, and things you should know. I am going to try to keep a page of these words available, and I am thinking I might put a link up to the best place we found to learn about the particular topic, as submitted by you. Or me if I did a better job of finding it. The point is, wouldn't it be nice to have a resource to visit that you can have brush up on your knowledge of conservation before a social function with "enlightened" people? That will be the goal here, to "clear the air of a little smugness" that you might encounter with the navy blue-staters.

Well, to inaugurate this little weekly task, here is your list of topics for the week.

Tankless Water heaters (like you didn't see this one coming.)
Geo-thermal energy systems (for heating and cooling your home)
Solar energy absorbing paint (this is crazy cool)

For fun, look up:

Belize
Costa Rica
Learning a new language.
It is not as difficult as you might think. This Rosetta Stone site has a great interactive demo of their learning program.

Enter your search terms Submit search form

Here are a few other places that might be useful, especially wikipedia.

http://wikipedia.org/
http://excite.com/

Energy-saving tips if you can't change your windows in warm weather climates.

Part 2 of 2

If you live in a warm weather climate, and are not in a position to change out your windows, there are things you can do to reduce energy loss and probably increase the comfort of your home in hot weather as well. Consult your homeowners' association rules to ensure you are not in violation; some HOA's take these rules very seriously; a topic for another day.

If you cannot replace your windows, there are certain things you can do, both semi-permanently and seasonally, to reduce your waste. There are both interior and exterior items to try, and I will break them down that way.

For the exterior, one of the simplest and most natural things you can do, if your circumstances permit, is to plant a nice shade tree in a strategic location, preferably where it will shade the west and south facing windows during the heat of the day, and also during your warm season. A bigger tree costs more money, but you can probably reduce the direct sun exposure on a lower level window significantly with a wide shade tree. This also benefits the environment. Consult a local nursery to see what trees work best in your climate. If you live in restricted water areas, remember you will have the ongoing cost of watering. Trees are beautify a neighborhood, so it is a good it is aesthetically pleasing to plant more trees as well. Some desert dwellers may disagree with you, but a nice tree is hard to argue with for most people.

Another thing you can do is add exterior sun screens to your windows that are most directly affected by the sun. You can make your own basic screen fairly easily; rolls of sunscreen fabric is available from Home Depot for about $30 for a 6' x 20' roll. You can buy it in bulk for a better price if you have a lot to cover. You make simple frames according to your window dimensions. Go to the window aisle at your local home Depot or Lowe's or a hardware store and ask them about the materials. I am not here to give you a step by step-I have never had the patience for that kind of writing, but stringing simple frames with the fabric is fairly easy. Basically these sunscreens will reduce the amount of heat absorbed by your windows, thereby reducing the amount of energy to cool the inside of the window. This actually does help a lot, and you can take them off during the winter season if you want to enjoy the winter sun.

Another similar concept is a mounted exterior roll-screen. It is also available at almost any large home improvement store, or you can order shades online at The Hut Shop. These shades work very well to keep direct sunlight from shining on the windows, as well as through the window. They claim to block 80% of UV rays. Regardless of the statistics, they can greatly reduce the amount of heat that comes through into the house. I installed one of these inside my atrium, as the sun does tend to heat up the area around the atrium significantly when shining directly on the windows. I also placed a smaller one on an upstairs window that was a significant source of summer heat, and it reduced the heat in that corner substantially. For the size of this home, and the age of the windows, the electric bills have been surprisingly low this summer, and I know these have helped. the beauty of these exterior shades is you can mount them using the unobtrusive brackets, and then take it down during the winter sun months, or simply roll it up out of the way. There are a couple of grades of the Coolaro shades, and the better one looks very nice, and as well as it blocks the sun, you can still see through it for the most part. a six foot by 10 foot goes for around a $100 at Lowe's. The designer quality one is more expensive, but looks a lot better.

Interior Solutions

There are also a couple of things you can do on the interior that can make a significant difference. One is very obvious, and that is install a good quality shade. Aluminum mini-blinds may help a bit, but it is hard to beat a heavy curtain, preferably light-colored to reflect heat away. This keeps much of the heat at the window, and away from the interior of the house. The downside, of course is a darkened room devoid of natural light. I don't prefer the heavy shade, but I have used a product that provides much of the same benefit, while leaving your windows open to natural light.

Heat control window film is basically the same thing as window tint film that is used in cars. It comes in several colors for different effects. There is relective mirror type, or a more blued finish. The film goes on simply as you could expect, but any type you are working with a big adhesive sheet of film, you will want help and to be very careful. It goes on very nicely, and gives you an acceptably clear window if you get it on nice and flush, but start crinkling it, and it you will likely end up feeling like you are looking through a fishbowl. You can cut to fit the film for your particular windows, and it really does help significantly in reducing UV rays-they claim 99%-and reflecting up to 70% of summer heat. It does go on with an adhesive, but it is fairly easy to remove, if you don't want it in the winter. The manufacturer claims it does help conserve 55% of window heat loss in the winter, so you may find yourself just leaving it up. This product retails for about $25 for a 2'x15' foot roll at Lowes.

These are just a few items you can try, and they are very helpful and will reduce your energy costs, improve comfort and lower your carbon footprint on the environment.

"Actorvists"

This is a great article in the LA Times...it is about actors who preach conservation. I wonder how many even use tankless water heaters
in their own mansions? Its not like they can't afford the technology. Hollywood is always preaching at us about how terrible we all are, but most of their ridiculous efforts amount to little when weighed against their personal consumption and waste. It doesn't go into great detail about individual hyprocrisies, but it does give you a website that follows celebrities who spout off about conservation. They should be the most sorry for their carbon footprint, as they jet around the country to talk about movies and tv shows, dragging entourages and assistants with them. What they do doesn't bother me-its necessary to their job- until they start telling us about how we don't care enough or do enough. It might be a personal flaw, but I don't like being told I am a sinner by a bigger sinner than myself. Learn about actors who speak loudly and make big dinosaur carbon footprints here. Ecorazzi


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Solar Energy will become more prevalent

There is a great article on solar power's impending impact on our energy consumption. It is expensive technology, but ultimately low maintenance. Cost over time makes it efficienct. I have to do some research, but there is some new solar technology that I am going to write about soon. Here is an article about it as a preview. Solar power is the future because it costs little to nothing to produce. One of the things that the article pointed out that I had never thought about is how the energy value peaks at the same time power demand peaks-during the heat of the day. Solar power technology is going to become more useable for all of us in the coming years.

Here is the article in The Arizona Republic.

Here is a link to Solar power in wikipedia.