I was riding my bike through Harpers Ferry, West Virginia today with a friend and stopped at the site of an old textile plant.

Everyone is familiar with 19th century water wheels powering small grain mills, but what was interesting about this pre-1850 installation was that they used four efficient turbines (see picture below) to drive an entire factory through mechanical transfer.

Water was gradually constricted by narrowing water tunnels, condensing the volume of water creating more power. Think of your finger squeezing over an open garden hose.

It was said that the factory could make fabric cheaper than mills in Baltimore.

Free power harnessed by American innovation 150 years ago ran an entire factory.

No worries about a 30% increase in the cost of natural gas. No hostile foreign governments to feed with our dollars. No commodity speculators to profit by escalation of price brought on by an energy monopoly strangling the economy. No competing for oil with India and China.

Free domestic power by harnessing the flow of nature.

Tunnels that brought water to the mill.

Posted in All posts from the start Innovation Motorcycles Water Power

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I was mowing with my electric lawn mower last night past my neighbor's full-sized Chevy pickup that now sits there for weeks at a time getting dirt circles under the tires. Chuck actually put stabilizer in the vehicle that gets 11mpg because it rarely gets used.

The cheap plug-in electric mower I purchased at the beginning of the summer is great.

Some handle hardware kept falling apart, but that was fixed with some lock washers for $2. It's quiet, doesn't stink when it runs, requires no maintenance and I haven't bought a drop of gasoline for a mower since.

The scooter that replaced the truck for commuting two months ago now has over 1000 miles on it.

Chuck's co-workers asked him if we was going to keep using it now that gasoline has dropped more than 50 cents a gallon. His reply, "No, now it just costs me $3.50 cents to fill the tank instead of $4." He often marvels at how much more money he has in his pocket now that it isn't getting burned up on gasoline to push around a huge metal box.

So as the summer comes to a close and gas prices decline because of a reduction in demand, the question is will people go back to consuming as it becomes more affordable.

Posted in All posts from the start Innovation MPG Motorcycles

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Blogging at 75 mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a very old Dell laptop.

In the computer industry, marketing green means recycling, using less hazardous materials and low energy use. You can buy a better computer every four months because it is better for the environment and works better... right?.

I was looking to build a laptop for free that was functional... with up to date functionality. I wanted a laptop that would supplement my high end work laptop that I use for video editing. A machine for vacations and mobility, like blogging from a motorcycle trip; places where I didn't want to risk damage, theft and data loss.

I was handed a kind donation by our office manager, a Dell Inspiron 5000e, for my experiment.

This machine was probably state of the art before the turn-of-the-century. Windows 98, 10 gig drive. 64 MB of RAM, no network connection, 1! USB port, and no wireless card. The nice part about these machines is that the screen is so small and the processor so slow, generally they don't take a lot of power. This thing will go hours on a battery.

At first I was going to build a Linux machine. I use Ubuntu on one of my home desktops and like it, but my subject only has 64 MB of RAM which is under the minimum for Ubuntu. I also wanted to use a Verizon Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) wireless broadband USB fob from my XP work laptop without much thinking about making it compatible.

Windows 98 is about useless. I wiped it with a copy of Windows 2000 that I had from a long dead laptop.

Added:
--Verizon broadband software connected to my one USB slot
--Firefox browser 3.0 (The IE browser that came with my old version of W2K was so old I couldn't even get into Microsoft's own download site to upgrade so I gave up)
-A 512 MB stick of RAM a friend gave me for free. Together with my 64 MB chip I now have 128 MB of RAM. You are not supposed to mix different kinds of RAM but it works. A BIOS update would probably extract more memory. I might get some real RAM, but that would cost me more than free.

Now I have the most current browser and mobile broadband. Most everything I do is browser based so I could stop here and be happy.

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Our 15th president James Buchanan probably never campaigned as the green candidate, but there was a plumbing system in his former Lancaster home, Wheatland, that collected water from the roof. The system dates back to around 1840.
Tap water was a rare luxury in the early part of the 19th century and though the house is about 5 miles from the center of Lancaster, five miles of rutted roads was pretty far out into the county - no running water, no electricity. This didn't stop American ingenuity.

The system collected water from a pipe in the roof and filled a cistern in the attic. The huge cistern was constructed of ferris metal plates and rivets. Water fed by gravity was piped down to a shower, tub and bidet in a room beneath the cistern

The water wasn't heated, but a hot attic would transfer heat to the metal cistern and large bodies of water generally take a long time to cool after a hot day. A guess would make this water about 50 degrees warmer than anything dipped from a well after some good sunny days of an unventilated attic.

According to Patrick Clarke, executive director for The James Buchanan Foundation, not much is currently known about the system. Clarke is in the photos.

Although President Bush hasn't campaigned as a green president, his home in Crawford Texas has a 25,000-gallon underground cistern that collects rainwater and gray water where it's purified and used for irrigation. (greenmesh 3/2007)

Check out the automated rainwater collection system I built that collects rainwater from my roof and stores it under my deck. - Part I, Part II, Part III

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My 55 gallon plastic barrels are recycled from Anderson's Car Wash. They cost $8 a piece and originally held bio-degradable detergent. The rain collection unit is placed under my deck with a spigot coming out of the lattice, so it is not visible from the yard.

Rain comes off the roof from a 3" ABS plastic pipe (1) and drops into the diverter 'T' (2). Air purges from vents (5) at the top of the barrels and allows the tanks to take on water until diverter is full. Water then passes beyond the diverter and out an overflow. The plenum (3) is pressurized by the tank volume and comes out a spigot (4) A pipe extending the plentum (6) allows debris to fall past the spigot outlet during filling. A plug is for seasonal clean out and tank expansion.

The diverter serves a couple functions...

Posted in All posts from the start Innovation Water Power video

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One of my hobbies is building hot water heating systems. I love to tune up an old steam radiator system. I am at home with pipes so my only reference for this project is my brain and maybe some inherited subconscious from my grandfather's HVAC business, Kuehnel Sheet Metal.

My friends at P.H. Plumbing Distributors, in York, once told me the qualifications for being a plumber are to know what time it is for dinner and than sh__ flows downhill. Well, it's not quite that simple in an age of building codes, but common sense and plumbing goes a long way.

Rain falls from the sky and runs to the lowest point on your property. Your house and gutter are a rainwater collector. If your house sits on the high part of your property, as it does in my case, then your system can use gravity to guide the natural flow of water.

My installation is on a row house, so I can "steal" part of my neighbor's water too. Chuck doesn't care because he is too busy riding his new scooter.

I didn't want to use electricity. There is a surprising amount of pressure from the bottom of a tank holding 100 gallons of water. My gravity fed spigot can fed from a 1/2 inch pipe and water 90% of my property with a hose. The outlet fill a container as quickly as my home's 55 psi city water spigot. I wanted to leave enough room beneath the spigot to fill a 5 gallon container.

NEXT: Parts and free pieces, we get dirty under the deck.

Posted in All posts from the start Innovation Tax incentives Water Power

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The Lawn-boy's 2-cycle engine is a mostly marvelously simple, low maintenance machine. You get a power stroke every other stroke instead of one in every every stroke for a four-stroke engine. Dump a small can of 2-cycle oil in the gas and you never have to worry about oil changes. They even put stabilizer in the mix so that winterization is automatic for the forgetful. However, by nature of burning oil in the gas creates more pollution than a 4 stoke engine and the 2-cycle has been phased out of the lawn mower market in the US. Shame on me... but it was free!

My first experience with an electric lawn mower was when I was a kid. A neighbor lady in a house dress had this orange Black & Decker. I stood mesmerized waiting for her to mow over the cord, just waiting for the explosive lawn show. It never happened.

Posted in All posts from the start Electric Innovation

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I was stretched out on my deck tonight gazing at the sky while a storm rolled in.
I came to the conclusion that only the sun and the rain, as long as they fall above my property, are free. What comes from the sky above my head cannot be taxed nor can it be repackaged, marketed and sold back to me at compounded profit and then taxed.

Harnessing these things in my backyard, I could take control of my increasingly squeezed and controlled by corporate entity - life.

The secret is in the invention, not buying the product.

I am going to build a rain collection system to water my garden. I can tell you right now that it will probably take 40 years to pay for the parts since water is pretty cheap, but it will be an exercise in securing freedom and independence. A working sculpture of hope for my future.

Posted in All posts from the start Innovation Oil Machine/politics Solar Water Power Wind Power

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Once upon a time, the philosophy behind letting a diesel engine idle was that it did more wear and tear on the engine and the fuel cost was marginal. Plus, long haul drivers sleep and relax in their trucks so it becomes a home away from home that needs power and climate control for a good night sleep.

Local New Oxford blogger (youngtrucker.blogspot.com) reminds fellow drivers to use an auxiliary power unit (APU). The small motor generator combination powers the mobile home of a driver while greatly reducing fuel cost by not running the large engine.

Each year, U.S. Trucks consume more than 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel without even moving. More specifically, the University of California, Davis estimates that each year the average truck consumes approximately 1,818 gallons of diesel fuel while idling. Under this assumption, those calculations result in over $6,000 in fuel costs at a national average of $3.00/ gallon per truck, per year. peakpowertools.com

And that was last week the current average price for road diesel in the US is $4.15 (5/5/08) That is an increase of $1.36 in the past year. In York County, $4.29 is about the lowest price today for a gallon of diesel.

Posted in All posts from the start Diesel Innovation MPG

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The concept of a fuel cell for fueling cars and small electronics is just waiting to come of age.

Sony has combined a Lithium-polymer battery with a new hybrid fuel cell. The methanol powered fuel cell also recharges a battery during operation allowing the 1.2-inch by 2.0-inch power pack device to shed off excess power to the battery and power on after the fuel source has been depleted. intomobile.com

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