Create An Eco Friendly Fireplace With Fireplace Inserts

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Traditional wood burning fireplaces are quite inefficient when it comes to heating your house. Most of the heat rises up the chimney with the smoke and ash. Fireplace inserts are created to fit into your existing wood fireplace and supply an isolation barrier to trap the warmth and blow it back out into your home.

The traditional wood burning fireplace insert is insulated so it minimizes the air flow allowing the wood to burn slower and more completely. This creates more heat and traps it. You can also purchase a blower to go with the insert to generate the heat through the entire home. Wood burning fireplace inserts are quite heavy since they usually constructed from steel or cast iron with insulated glass in the front. Generally they cost in between $1,000 and $2,000. Modern day inserts ought to include piping that runs up the chimney to generate a proper flow and to prevent creosote build-up and fires.

Gas inserts utilize a gas flame under ceramic logs to get a clean burning flame. There is no smoke or toxic fumes to cope with and they may be connected on your natural gas system.

Electric fireplace inserts plug right into your nearest wall plug and creates a flame like appearance not an actual flame so that you don’t even require a chimney. The electric fireplace insert is also the least expensive to run since it only uses the power required for a light bulb or two. These inserts are also the least realistic looking.

Pellet fireplace inserts use recycled pellets made from scrap wood and recycled cardboard, paper and other waste material. These are eco-friendly because of the use of recycled material.

Inserts are an easy way to improve the efficiency of your wood burning fireplace and be greener. They provide heat better and permit less smoke into the home. The downside is that they may be expensive to purchase and install which means you need to consider the costs vs. the savings in heat. Inserts can also be quite heavy. Some cities are now banning wood fireplaces so if you want a fireplace you will have no choice but to get an insert.

Before you buy anything online, make sure you check Paul Stevens’ excellent lens on Eco Friendly Fireplaces

Biofuel boom could follow oil price spike | Damian Carrington

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When biofuels match oil on price, production could boom in the developing countries that also have the greatest need to boost food supply

The production of biofuels, good thing or not, will be decided by the setting of targets in the big western energy markets, right? Wrong, said bio-energy expert Jeremy Woods, at Imperial College, when I spoke to him yesterday.

He thinks biofuel production could pass a tipping point and start to rocket as rising oil prices make the plant-derived fuel cheaper in many developing countries around the world.

“Once oil is over $ 70 a barrel, conventional and new generation biofuels become cost competitive, certainly with tar sands and shale, and with oil from much of the Middle East and Brazil’s new offshore fields,” he says. “When oil and biofuels are competitive, we are into a different world.”

Even more striking is his suggestion that this biofuel boom is most likely to happen in those developing countries that have fast growing populations and food needs. That’s because those countries, including many African nations, are particularly vulnerable to high oil costs, for both transport and farming.

But Woods is not an opponent of biofuels. “Bioenergy done well is absolutely needed,” he told me, at a Royal Society event titled Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. He believes projects that work with smallholders and ensure benefits are kept within the country can produce biofuels responsibly. “Delivering investment in this way may be the only way to raise yields,” he adds.

However, there are risks too, he says, and these are greater if demand drives the production of large volumes in a short period of time. In that scenario, foreign companies or governments would secure vast tracts of land and export all the fuel and profits. That will exacerbate existing problems in the host country, he says, and could lead to people being driven off the land. “The harder you pull the lever [of biofuel production], the more likely you are to get competition between fuel and food.

Also yesterday, an unexpected benefit of some biofuel production was revealed in a scientific paper – they can cool the local area by as much a 2C.

The modelling study, by Matei Georgescu at Arizona State University and colleagues, indicated that replacing conventional crops such as wheat and maize with perennial grasses used for biofuel production cut temperatures.

Georgescu says he is not advocating a widespread switch, but that this cooling phenomenon should be taken into account when making decisions about biofuels. “It dawned on me that some mechanisms were not being accounted for in this topic which has implications for millions of people,” he told me.

The cooling happens for two reasons. First, the grasses – switchgrass or miscanthus – cover the ground for more of the year, preventing the sun heating the ground. Second, and more important, the plants transpire more, i.e. they evaporate more water into the atmosphere.

All this is unlikely to persuade some that biofuels can be green. Keith Taylor, the Green Party MEP for South East England said on Monday: “Although biofuels come from plants they are not a ‘green’ solution. Growing, transporting and burning biofuels has devastating effects on people and the environment both in the UK and around the world.”

Keith added: “Relying on biofuels to solve our energy crisis simply dumps the problem on developing countries. What we need is more efficient use of energy and committed investment in clean renewables like wind, solar and tidal power.”

We’ll be following the biofuel story closely in the future, so feel free to let me know what you think we should be looking at in the comments below.

Environment: Biofuels | guardian.co.uk

The unusual uses of urine | Richard Sugg

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Urine has enjoyed an impressive range of practical and medical uses for much of history, so here’s to pee power

Sarah DeWeerdt’s recent article tells of how “Gerardine Botte, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio University … has developed a technology to generate hydrogen fuel from urine”.

Urine has, in fact, had an impressive range of practical uses for much of history. A key area was medicine. In Rome, Pliny the Elder recommended fresh urine for the treatment of “sores, burns, affections of the anus, chaps and scorpion stings”, while stale urine mixed with ash could be rubbed on your baby for nappy rash. In early-modern Europe numerous medical luminaries went further. Pioneering French surgeon Ambroise Paré noted that itching eye-lids could be washed in the patient’s urine – provided that it had been kept “all night in a barber’s basin” first. The father of chemistry, Robert Boyle, advised certain patients to drink every morning “a moderate draught of their own urine”, preferably while “tis yet warm”. Anyone indignantly demanding a second opinion would find that Thomas Willis – the richest doctor in England at the time – was instructing a young gentlewoman to drink her own warm urine against “extreme sourness” in her throat.

Other cases could be far more urgent. In about 1550 the Italian doctor Leonardo Fioravanti saw a man’s nose sliced off in an argument, and promptly urinated on the fallen organ before stitching it back on. Henry VIII’s surgeon Thomas Vicary recommended that all battle wounds should be washed in urine; and others advised the same for potentially gangrenous ulcers, or poisonous bites and stings. Being sterile when it leaves the body, urine was then a far safer cleaning agent than the kind of water typically available.

Forms of processed urine could be used in no less desperate situations. In 1666 the physician George Thomson was recommending it against the plague; and over in France in 1671 the chemist Matte la Faveur was patiently collecting vast quantities of unadulterated child’s urine (“about sixty pints [from] little children who drink very little wine”) to make a volatile salt from it. Such advanced therapies were of course not for the humbler sort. On 13 June 1685, for example, we find Madame de Sévigné telling her daughter of how, “for my vapours I take eight drops of essence of urine”.

Boyle, who performed numerous experiments with human blood and urine – including using both as invisible inks – noted how the latter was highly valued by dyers; while the historian Dominique Laporte reminds us of its popularity for the cleaning of hats in France. Then we have cosmetics. The Elizabethan surgeon William Bullein advised those “whose faces be unclean” to wash their skin with “strong vinegar, milk and the urine of a boy”. In 1675 The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physic, Beautifying, and Cookery told of how one’s own urine was “very good to wash the face withal, to make it fair”. Compare the northern Scottish author Mary Beith, who (writing in 1995) emphasises that, “today, urea remains an important ingredient in medicinal skin creams”, also recalling “babies having their faces wiped with their own wet nappies” by way of skin care: “a friend of mine with four boys made a virtual religion” of this, “and not one of those boys became a spotty teenager”. (Anyone who remains unconvinced may like to bear in mind that Roman women were known to beautify their cheeks with human excrement, while those afflicted by smallpox in later centuries could fill the pits with a mixture of human fat and beeswax.)

Cases of plague or serious wounds remind us of how historical context can radically alter one’s disgust threshold. Compare, too, those soldiers of the first world war who used cloth patches soaked in their own urine as rudimentary gas masks (the ammonia in the urine counteracting the chlorine in the gas). In The New Confessions, William Boyd’s errant hero, John James Todd, has a memorable experience of this when, as night sentry, he yells a gas warning and produces a collective deluge of urine (and urine-damped faces) – only to then find that he has actually sighted nothing more poisonous than a drift of thick mist.

Those of us who live long enough may find that the urine-powered car is an essential piece of technology in the age of rising fuel costs and melting ice-caps. Vehicles have already been run on chip fat, for example. Moreover, in November 2008 the Beverly Hills surgeon Craig Alan Bittner suddenly closed his thriving liposuction practice and fled to South America. Why? Bittner had been using the extracted fat of patients as “lipodiesel” to fuel the SUVs of himself and his girlfriend, and was therefore violating state laws on medical waste. Perhaps one day drivers won’t stop to use the toilet, but use the toilet so that they don’t have to stop at all …

Environment: Biofuels | guardian.co.uk

How To Build A 50MPH Electric Bike Review – Fast Electric Bike

TweetIs How To Build a 50MPH Electric Bike Scam?
An electric bicycle, also referred to as an e-bike, is a bicycle with an electric motor used to power the car. Electric bicycles commonly cost between US$500 and US$3,000, use rechargeable batteries and can travel up to 15 to 20 miles per hour (24 to 32 km/h). According to the laws of the nation in which they are sold, in some markets they are rapidly replacing classic bikes and motorcycles. Read more

Electricity Blueprint REVIEW – Ambient Vibration Energy Now Gives You Cheap Power In Your Household For Life

TweetImagine connecting the whole selection of electrical devices around your home to a generator that provides you cheap energy month after month and enables you to log off the grid?

Generating electricity round the home is becoming a real life-saver to keep the debts at a minimum in these cash strapped days.

The times of recklessly using electricity with lights burning all day long and machines on the go virtually non-stop and rarely worrying concerning the cost of it, are gone for a long time, otherwise permanently. Read more

Information On Hydroelectric Power

TweetHydroelectric power arises from falling or streaming waters. The cascading or streaming h2o has kinetic power whenever it travels from higher elevations to lower elevations. “Hydro” means water. Hydro power utilizes the power of running water to generate power. In the most basic terminology, h2o falls as a result of the law of gravity, which in turn causes kinetic energy to become physical energy, which can turn into a effective kind of electrical energy.

Hydroelectricity is among the earliest kinds of alternative energy. It was used generations back by the early Chinese and Greek people. These people made use of the power of the river and stream to run water wheels which would move their apparatus like the millstones. Hydroelectric facilities of these times function in the same way as these age-old civilizations. The one big difference is the fact that today hydroelectric power plants utilize fast moving h2o to make a turbine that powers a generator which in turn makes electrical power.

There are several great things about hydroelectric energy. The best of which is the fact that it will not harm the planet in the manner that oil or nuclear power plants do since it does not make any harmful waste products or contaminants. Hydroelectric power may be generated all over the world. Hydroelectric facilities can surpass Five decades. Hydroelectric energy does not require imported fuels. Companies like Ambit Energy even offers you incentives and earn revenue from it.

An additional obvious advantage of hydroelectric energy is a hydropower plant doesn’t have to rely on fuel like coal, oil or uramium. As a result, totally minimizing the issues of obtaining a fuel source to generate power. A hydropower plant’s power is effectively rapidly streaming river water, that you can get in great quantity and also One Hundred Percent free. In addition to reducing on the fuel expenses, a hydropower plant additionally decreases the people employed at the plant. This type of facility won’t need a lot of employees to look after it, nor will it need a lot of experts. So, this will save significant amounts of investment that could have in any other case been allocated to operating the plant. These issues help minimize the expense of producing usable power.

With all the raising risk of errant climatic change nations around the world and individuals seem to be thinking about alternative sources of energy and power technology. One of the most researched energy have been done on hydroelectricity. The main edge, and actual basis for setting up these methods is to minimize and sometimes get rid of carbon pollutants and dangerous gases. You might want to consider producing earnings from energy sources and in return, help the environment at the same time, I would recommend considering Ambit Energy.

- Ambit Energy

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