Shopping at my local Farmers Market

Bath Farmer's Market on the riverfront

Now that I am renting out my guest room as a Bed and Breakfast (via airbnb), I have decided to feature local foods for breakfast.  So I go to the local farmers market in Bath every Saturday morning which is on the riverfront about 5 miles from my home.  It is late October here in Maine and today is the last day that it will be held outdoors and it was quite brisk with temperatures in the low 40s.  For the winter the market moves into a large boat shed further up the riverfront.

I offer my B&B guests a breakfast that includes eggs from free range chickens, locally made turkey or pork breakfast sausage and/or locally made bread with my homemade Crabapple jam or jelly.  I also offer them dinner if they wish and I prepare anything from burgers made from local grass fed beef to salmon cakes served with locally grown vegetables.  I often find home made pies or muffins to offer for dessert.  Blueberry pie is a local favorite.

Goranson Farm stand

It is always a pleasant experience to review all of the offerings at the market and bump into friends and neighbors who are also shopping.  Some of the local farmers are better known to me than others.  I have visited the Goranson family farm several times and have watched them processing maple syrup in the spring.  They are one of the biggest organic farmers in the region with a large variety of produce.  I am always pleased to be able to support my local farmers and my guests compliment me on the food I prepare for them.

Community Supported Agriculture is a growing and thriving industry here in Maine.  There is a Farm to School program that has become quite successful at bringing fresh foods into the schools.  It is encouraging to see this focus on natural and organic foods and the public response to it.  While natural food can be more expensive, I firmly believe in voting with my dollar for a more sustainable future for our planet while also the supporting local economy.

Slått av svenskene

En gang, da jeg begynte på siv.ing.-studiet Energi og Miljø, ble det referert mye til målene om 10 TWh fornybar energi/energisparing innen 2020, hvorav 3 TWh skulle komme fra vindkraft. Det er vel lenge siden de fleste skjønte at det ikke kom til å gå, og det var vel noen forsiktige forsøk på å omdefinere dette målet fra ferdig utbygd til påbegynt. Uten at det hjalp på måloppnåelsen.

Nå viser det seg at svenskene har klart det vi ikke har klart. Noe som bare bekrefter inntrykket av Norge som sinke innen ny fornybar energisektoren, til tross for at Soria Moria-erklæringen sier det stikk motsatte. Desverre så virker det ikke som det er noe man får mye tyn for, utenfor forskningsmiljøer og miljøvernorganisasjoner.

Derfor lurer jeg på: Har klimaspørsmålet gått av moten i media, og dermed mistet interessen hos nordmenn? Og er politikere avhengig av å ha en blitzlampe i ansiktet for å følge opp en sak? Er vi så korttenkte at alt som ikke kommer med fete typer i avisen går i glemmeboka?

A nice piece of ash - made into a bowl

Apple wood bowls

 One of my hobbies (some would say obsessions) is wood turning.  In particular I like to make bowls from trees cut in my neighborhood or from logs that my friends bring me.  I sell some of these bowls in local craft galleries, and give others as gifts.  The bowls above came from an old apple tree that blew down in a storm back in the spring and I have been mining the wood for months.  Fruit wood tends to be very attractive and colorful.

 Here's a time-lapse video showing the process I use to make a small bowl from Apple wood (click the image to see it on YouTube):

Making a bowl from fresh-cut apple wood

 A few months ago a crew working for the utility company came through the area cutting trees back from the power lines and my friend and neighbor John noticed that they had cut down a substantial ash tree that was around 14 inch diameter at the base.  He "rescued"  the trunk and cut it up so that he and I could make bowls from it.  He offered me a piece that he had cut into a cylinder for me as a "bowl blank".  I got to work on it this weekend and it took me around three hours on the lathe to make into a nice salad bowl that measures around 9 inch diameter.  It is fairly hefty at over 1 lb. 6 oz., and the grain pattern is quite lovely.  It is finished with mineral oil that needs to be reapplied as the wood dries out.

9" diameter Ash bowl

I always sign each piece and identify the wood it was made from.

 It is surprising the amount of shavings that come from a single bowl like this, there was enough to fill up 3 - 5 gallon buckets.  I let it dry on my work shop floor for a while and then store it for use as kindling for my wood stove.

gallons of wood shavings from a single bowl

If anyone wants this beautiful bowl - or one like it, I sell them for $7/inch diameter - so a 5" bowl = $35.  Email me if you're interested.

Automating dawn to dusk energy recovery ventilation

Light sensitive relay control for HRV

Recently, I installed a single room Energy Recovery Ventilator in the dining area of our house because I had become concerned about interior air quality in the winter when the windows are all sealed up with interior insulating storm windows.  One of its nifty features includes a light sensor that turns it down to the slowest fan speed when it is dark.  While it is 92% efficient, there is no good reason to ventilate a room when it is very cold at night and there is no one in the room.  I was impressed by this simple automation feature.

Back in 2008 I had installed a Heat Recovery Ventilator in my well sealed and super insulated workshop in order to get fresh air into my office in the winter when the windows are also closed up and sealed with my DIY interior storm windows.  I was running this HRV on a programmable digital timer and found that I needed to keep adjusting the settings so that it would turn on after sunrise and turn off around sunset.  It just occurred to me that I could build a device that would do this automatically based on the ambient light in my utility room that has a south facing window.  Being an electrical engineer who designs products for living, it was relatively simple for me to design a circuit for this application. The device is pictured above and plugs into an outlet just like a wall power adapter.  It contains a simple circuit that reads a photocell and activates an internal solid-state relay based on the light level set by an adjustable knob. 

Now my HRV automatically operates only from dawn to dusk, keeping the air in my office fresh while I am there and saving energy when it is not needed.

For the DIY inclined, here is a link to the schematic of the circuit I built.  I am considering making a small production run of these useful light triggered switches, so drop me a line if you have an interest and I will consider making a batch of them.  This is the opposite of the kind of device you would use to turn on a Christmas tree light at night and I am pretty sure there is nothing commercially available that turns on power when the room light gets brighter.  I built everything into an AC wall plug enclosure made by Polycase, but it could be built into a standard electrical box with an extension cord spliced into it.

Heating my bedroom - recovering chimney heat

In my last post I explored optimal ways to heat my bedroom using a small electric heater.  In this post I will detail how I have diverted trapped heat from around the chimney in the hallway to heat my room.  The chimney is cinder block and was exposed when my ex and I bought the house.  It was pretty ugly so I boxed it in with drywall on both floors, being careful to keep combustibles several inches from the hot surface.

The large wood stove in the basement is big enough to heat the whole house as heat rises from the open basement stairs and 2nd floor stairs to the bedrooms and bathroom.  The pictures below show the first floor boxed in chimney and the vents I installed to release the trapped heat.

   

By ventilating the closed space around the chimney I am releasing heat that could build up in the event of a chimney fire which is an added benefit.  But the primary goal was to recover this trapped heat.

My bedroom is adjacent to the chimney and I had used a similar scheme to ventilate the walled in chimney on the 2nd floor, but the vents both were in the hallway.  I decided to move the upper vent into my bedroom to divert the heat there.  This drawing shows the simple change I made:

Here's the bedroom wall before I cut the vent:

  

As you can see the area near the chimney is warmer than the other walls - through 2 layers of drywall!

After cutting the hole and closing off the vent in the hallway, I immediately felt warm air exiting the new vent in my bedroom.

 

With only a moderate fire going the heat coming from the vent is at least 10F hotter than the ambient room temperature. 

And after keeping the stove lit for a few days it's a lot warmer at the top vent (105F).

So I'm hoping this recovered heat will reduce the electricity needed to heat the bedroom.

Filling the solar collectors for my workshop solar heating system

Every fall as the temperatures start dropping down to freezing I fill the collectors for my solar heating system with antifreeze solution, and in the spring I drain them.  I don't need the heat in the spring and summer.  If the antifreeze fluid gets too hot it will cause an over pressure in the collectors and also the fluid will turn acidic and begin to corrode the copper plumbing.

I mix a 50% solution of antifreeze and water and pump it from a 5 gallon bucket into the collectors and then run the pump long enough to purge air from the system.  Air bubbles can stall the pump and that is a big problem that can cause over heating.

Each year I note when I fill and drain the system on the wall of my 80 gallon storage tank (which is a regular water heater used just as a holding tank for solar heated water).  And yes we have a 7 to 8 month heating season in Maine!

Today it is cloudy and I don't expect any sun.  My system controller (that I manufacture - click here to learn more) shows 83F at the collectors and 121F at the top of the tank.  The tank temperature is high due to the propane backup that maintains the tank at 110 to 120F.  The collectors can heat the tank up to well over 180F on a good day and that is the free solar heat that I use to warm my workshop and office.

You can see a detailed blog about the design and construction of my solar heating system here. 

Here's a system diagram - click here or on the image to see live performance data.

Hydrogen Cell Cars and Electric Cars

By Hammad Majeed, NTNU [writer], Usman (NTNU), Lizhen (NTNU), Shahla Gondal, NTNU, Naveed Asif, NTNU, and Idan Liebes
at NorRen summer school 2020

Energy plays a key role in world economy. International energy agency (IEA, 2020a) believes that, if the policies and plans by various governments with respect to energy usage will be implemented than the world primary energy demands will increase by 36% in between 2020 and 2035.

Transportation plays a vital role in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, as 33 % of the energy demands come from this sector (Eurostat, 2020).  In order to reduce CO2 emissions and to meet the challenge a strategy for energy efficiency plus renewable energy along with CCS should be implemented. Hydrogen and electric vehicles are one of the key points towards clean environment and to accomplish energy demands.

Social Aspects of Hydrogen Cell vs Electric Cars

This blog doesn’t deals with technical evaluation of these cars instead it depicts people thinking about these technologies. An online survey with in Norway was done along with person to person interaction in Asker city center (Norway) in order to extract information on realistic basis to understand what are the future potential of these technologies, how people will adopt it in to their daily lives, how much they want to spend on these types of cars, whether they have knowhow about these technologies are not.

Total of 86 people were asked about their opinions in the form of questionnaire. The results are explained in graphical method as;

Figure 1: People profile on the basis of gender and age and No. of cars they own

Figure 2: How much they want to spend per month in terms of fueling/tax

Figure 3: Daily usage in terms of kilometers

Figure 4: Maximum one sitting travel in last year

Figure 5: Public awareness about technology

Figure 6: Market projection about vehicles

Conclusions

The main theme of this work was to extract statistics whether people have information about these technologies and if governmental incentives are provided to manufactures and to end users whether they will invest a huge amount of money for their new cars as these technologies are expensive, to help in building green environment.

It is evident form these graphical explanations that that public perspective about these clean environment technologies are very constructive. About 58 % of the people have daily mileage of around 20-50 Km, so there is a huge potential for these clean cars. People are very much aware about both technologies and market projection depicts that around 50 % of people can invest in 100,000-250,000 Kr for their new car. This will provide the road to fulfill energy loads of current era with transition to a cleaner, domestic and more secure energy future.

IEA, International Energy Agency, 2020a. “World energy outlook”, Executive summary

http://www. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu , stats from “May 2020”