January 15, 2008

Energy

Vestas turbine collapse

Vestas turbines safety fears after two collapse in quick succession in the UK. Danish company denies there is a problem.

Read More »

GreenGuard Your Home

You are working hard to make your home energy efficient, comfortable and self-sufficient what more can you do? How about making sure that the environment inside your house is not as bad or worse then that of a major city industrial zone.

It has been shown that because of building materials, furniture, carpet, animals and so on that the indoor air quality can be much worse then your outdoor one. On top of that unless you have some test done you don’t know what is polluting your home. If you have the time and knowledge you can research each product already in your home to see what could be released from each item into your home environment.

Then there are those products that claim to be friendly and not harm you interior air quality, but how to research their claims can be mystery in itself. If you want to make sure that all new products you want to use in your home are safe ask if they are GreenGuard Certified. You can follow this link to search products and find out for yourself about products you own or are thinking of buying.

GreenGuard is an independent tester of products that will not harm the inside environment. Since they are a third party entity this certification is one that can be trusted. GreenGuard has three certification levels, GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®, GREENGUARD for Children & SchoolsSM, and GREENGUARD for Building Construction. As stringent as their indoor air quality certification is they added the level for children and school as children are exposed to more toxins then adults, by eating, drinking and breathing more then adults along with their bodies additional sensitivities. They have used a correction of 0.43 in their standard test to make sure products carrying this certification are also safe to our youth. You can find listing and more detailed information through each of the links provided.

Since we are building our homes to improve the environments we live in, it just make since to make sure that we include indoor air quality in that equation.

Read More »

Roof Roof Woof

Dog Sitting

Today was different, my neighbor had to go into town, not the nearby town, but one further away, it is an all day trip, I volunteered to take care of his dog while he was gone, his dog does not do good at being left behind, my neighbor usually takes his dog everywhere, but this trip just wouldn’t work with a furry friend along. I got up early today, about 7:30am, boy was it COLD, the infrared temperature reading device said the ladder outside the door was 9 degrees F, the floor inside my cabin read 24 degrees, the food cabinet read 35 degrees (whew!). I walked to my neighbor’s house, I’ve been here most of the day, I did some laundry and dishes, I also cleaned up a bit, he is ex-military and he is very neat and clean, so it’s hard to find too much to clean, but I found a few things (grin).

Our other friends who live out here came by for a while, they went to the store in town, they offered to do some shopping if we needed anything, I gave a short list of food we needed from the store and they got it, it’s real nice to have such great friends out here, people really look out for each other out here.

The Roof

It might rain and/or snow later tonight, so the roof became the item of the day to work on, the roof, up until now had consisted of 3/4 inch plywood over 2×4’s, Bob used heavy builder’s plastic (sound familiar???) over the top of that to make it waterproof, since for the most part, it’s pretty dry here, that worked just fine, but since we have been here full time, we have walked on the roof quite a lot, and the builder’s plastic is not in as good of shape as it had been, so we knew that before the next rain or snow, we would need to take care of this.

Bob had collected recycled metal panels referred to as “R-Panel”, it’s called that because of the shape of the panel, he had enough to cover the roof, last week when he went to town to get his tooth looked at, he picked up a gallon of roof coating (tar), today he spent the day installing the metal panels to the roof, he also needed to pick up or cover up some of our stuff that is still outside to protect it from the possible wet weather. I wished I could have been there to help, but I was busy dog-sitting, so I had to suffer all day long, watching TV (the cooking channel and the DIY channel), washing with HOT water… life is tough out here… :)

Read More »

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments, I really REALLY appreciate them, please keep ’em coming, ask questions if you want, I’ll answer, I try to put in as much detail as possible, but it’s easy to forget that in my mind (that’s sometimes a scary place, the echo is terrible), I am familiar with what I am talking about (???!!!) and I know what the subject/item(s) look like, it’s too easy sometimes to gloss over something and not give enough of an explanation. So ask questions if you want, ask about anything, make requests, I’ll do my best to answer asap.

Wretha

Read More »
Available for Amazon Prime