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Archive for May, 2007

work featured in Architecture Today

Posted in architecture, biofuel, biomass, climate change, energy, engineering, renewable energy on May 29, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Chiltern Downs visitors centre

A project I led at XCO2 is being featured in the Ecotech supplement in Architecture Today this month (no link yet). It’s a visitors centre for the National Trust in the Chiltern Downs expected to provide services to around 400,000 visitors a year. And it’s loaded with green goodness: woodchip boiler for space and water heating, rainwater harvesting for toilet flushing, and an earth coupled ventilation system that brings air into the building through a 90m long concrete pipe buried below ground. (more…)

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paging William Perry

Posted in energy, engineering, house, renewable energy on May 23, 2007| 1 Comment »

There’s another fridge discussion at No Impact Man, where he’s asked for ideas on how to keep milk fresh. In one of the comments, someone pointed to a passive ice box that freezes about a cubic meter of ice in winter and keeps your food cool the rest of the year. Kick ass. Unfortunately it looks like it requires much colder winter temperatures than we get here in Marche.

Someone else mentioned the Mitti Cool, a passive clay refrigerator invented in India. That’s more like it!

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a fridge too far

Posted in climate change, energy, house on May 21, 2007| 2 Comments »

freezer iceI was lamenting in a post about compact florescent bulbs how I didn’t know where else we could significantly cut electricity consumption. Then I saw this post from Greenpa. Turns out I wasn’t thinking hard enough.

(more…)

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answering the 26 most common climate myths

Posted in climate change, energy on May 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

The New Scientist published a fantastic article this week answering the 26 most commonly used arguments against climate change. Keep it close to hand.

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CHP oversold as a means of reducing carbon

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, engineering, london, micro chp, renewable energy on May 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

Via Tom N, a great article in BSJ on whether CHP (and CHP + cooling) actually has as much potential to reduce carbon emissions as the industry (and Ken Livingstone) would have you believe.

In general, I agree with James Thonger’s conclusions. However… (more…)

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widening spark gap boosts CHP

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, micro chp, renewable energy on May 17, 2007| 2 Comments »

According to online energy auction house BuyEnergyOnline, during April 2007 UK gas wholesale prices rose by just 1% while electricity prices increased 13%, making the widest spark gap since deregulation. (more…)

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biomass delivery

Posted in biofuel, biomass, climate change, energy, engineering, house, italy, renewable energy on May 16, 2007| 1 Comment »

pellet delivery 2
Maurizio brought round our last one-tonne bag of wood pellets a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to post photos since. He’s been holding the last bag for us since last autumn when we only managed to get five of the six tonnes we’d bought into the pellet store.

We’ve now got plenty of pellets. A few too many, actually, because when you buy pellets you should a) buy in the summer when pricespellet delivery 1 are lower and b) buy as much as you can so you spread the cost of transport across as many tonnes as possible. We’ve now got enough pellets to get us through to the start of the heating season, which is a problem. If we buy in the next few months we won’t be able to fit more than 3 or 4 tonnes in the store because of our leftovers. If we buy in winter, we’ll buy at a premium and have to wait in line with everyone else. As a solution I’m hoping to find storage space somewhere (like Carletti’s barn or Marco’s cantina) so we can buy maybe 10 tonnes over the summer and transfer them to the pellet store as we need them.

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