Alternative energy

[Christine]

I'm off the grid, so that's of course another subject that personally interests me. I have less than $5k in my system, but it's far from perfect. Works for ME, but most people would want to spend another few thousand on solar panels to be comfortable and to get a pure sine wave inverter.

My little addition on the South side is going to help heat and cool. It's really enjoyable making adobe bricks and building with mostly free materials. I only had to buy straw, some lumber, a $20 used entry door and windows.

I'm about ready to really THINK about a solar water heater. I expect several trials and errors to get it to work with my regular propane water heater (which isn't hooked up to propane). The current plan is to "somehow" build a 5 gallon water container, have the flex copper line spiraling inside the big southern window and gravity heat the water in the container. Then this preheated water goes to the regular water heater.

I'm not at all clear on how to do the fittings so they won't leak under about 50 lb of pressure.

When my nephew was here in summer, he built a roof top heating system out of PVC (which is known to overheat and break). It worked well until a PVC fitting popped. Made enough noise to really scare us. Since it freezes in winter, it wasn't too big a loss, but made for a good test. He fixed it once or twice and he had warm water for the outdoor shower.

I got used to always turn on the hot water faucet when I needed any water during the day. And once the water in the 40 gallon water heater was hot, it worked quite well - in summer.

My sister paid 40,000 Euros for a solar hot water heating system and I'd like to keep the cost at a few hundred dollars. We'll see how it goes.

There is SO much cool stuff and it's truly amazing what people come up with.

I recently heard a report about a guy who already got hundreds of millions in funding to CONVERT regular cars to electric. He plans on having battery exchange stations and it works much like the propane bottle exchange at many stores. Although you don't need to lift the batteries out yourself, somebody at the battery station does the exchanging. Cool idea, I hope the lower gas prices don't kill the plan.

I'd like to see a forum with credible reviews of various products, DYI instructions and of course the best places to buy.