The Honda ANF125i Innova motorbike is a super-efficient bike to start with, but to bring it to the next level of fuel economy, it takes a certain level of ingenuity and craftsmanship, as well as a good understanding of the factors at play in how much fuel a vehicle uses. Allert Jacobs obviously has those qualities; he turned his 100+ MPG Honda (see photo of what it looks like unmodified below) into a 200+ MPG low-CD streamliner.
Honda ANF125i Innova. Not exactly same as bike below, but close.
Some Specs
The modified motorbike weights 319lbs (about 88lbs more than the standard bike). The engine is a fuel injected, four stroke, 125cc single, producing 9 hp (6.85 kW). A realistic figure of real-world MPG for the unmodified bike is around Read More… »
New Mexico, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]
Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used.
The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing.
The solar particles, fabricated of crystalline silicon, hold the potential for a variety of new applications. They are expected eventually to be Read More… »
The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.
Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it’s not too soft: “If the bamboo’s too watery, it’s not as dense and it’s not as strong,” Aguinaldo explains.
Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.
Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand. Read More… »
Recently I came across a new Google service, the Google Power Meter. This is a Google.org service that provides users with the ability to monitor their house’s energy usage from any web browser. It comes packaged in a very nice user interface, with interactive graphs and statistics in real time. I found that Google Power Meter harvests energy data through its partners, one of which is The Energy Detective, a small company that manufactures a device that harvests the data. The neat thing about the TED, as The Energy Detective’s device is called, works not only for monitoring your home’s energy use, but also your solar systems production! I will be posting more on Solar Data Monitoring later on, but for now, check out both of these websites, and evaluate whether or not The Energy Detective might be right for your solar system.
A few posts ago I talked about the Neuton cordless battery powered lawn mower. Here is a short informational video done by Neuton Power which shows it in action. This is definitely the best battery powered lawn mower out there.
This well pump is absolutely amazing. You can purchase them with either a lever arm or DC gear-motor, so you can use this to charge your pressure tank with or without electricity.
Simple Pump™ 100 industrial version in a de-watering application. Works smoothly even when installed at an angle and sustaining -27°C temperatures.
The Simple Pump pumps 3 to 5 gallons per minute from up to 250′ static water level. Your static water level is the level that the water in the well rests at normally. Usually it only rises and falls by a few feet on an annual basis, but severe drought or a neighbouring well drawing thousands of gallons could affect your static level. Your well could be drilled to 300ft, (a relatively deep well), and the static water level could be only 70ft. So there is hope for very deep wells to use a pump like this.
The Simple Pump works on an old well pumping method, the sucker rod. There is a page here that has lots of FAQ’s about the Simple Pump, and you can read a lot more on their site. Read More… »
These mowers definently have the “wow” factor. They don’t look at all like they belong out cutting grass.
The nice thing about these mowers is that they can very easily be set up to charge off of solar, making it perfect for lawn care businesses that choose to use electric lawn maintenance equiptment. And because it is cordless, there aren’t any of those issues with cords getting stuck on things, and you can go a long ways from any power outlet.
I am working on getting a kit together so that you can charge these mowers with solar. I hope to also include the supplies for creating a mobile charging setup, so that lawn maintanace businesses could charge an extra set of batteries while they were in the field, as long as they parked their truck in the sun.
Fox 44 did a review on the battery mower here. Be sure to watch it.
“Before I start this review, you should know that I have a love/hate relationship with lawns. Living in the Northeast, they’re a necessary evil when one has not yet shifted an entire backyard to something built on permaculture. On the other hand, a recently cut lawn does look beautiful and sharp — something drilled into my head from summers of mowing other lawns to make cash in High School. Read More… »
Should be Able to do 235 MPG
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