GOON Get Off Oil Now! Alternative Energy Ideas and Info

This web page is designed to promote the idea of GETTING OFF OIL NOW in particular and hydrocarbons in general as soon as possible. I believe it is of the greatest importance to do this as fast as we can. I will post information on every method I can find to save energy or get it from the environment or store it for later use. I will post real life information about the things I have tried and how they worked. Check back often as I already have a fair amount of information to post.

Update 9/19/10 Again I made a new mount so I could put 2 of my 8 BP175 panels on the pole. I will try to put a couple more in the "My Solar Setup" page.

Update 8/22/10 I finally got around to cleaning up my wiring. I now have a nice neat board with all my wiring and fusing on it. This makes it much neater and gets the rat's nest off of the floor. I will try to post more pics and info on the "My Solar Setup" page.

Update 8/25/09 I made a new mount so I could put all 3 of my panels on the pole. There are a couple more pictures in the "My Solar Setup" page.

Update 2/17/09 I aquired a small windturbine inexpensively on Ebay. The installation is now complete and it is making power for me. It is fun to watch it track the wind and spin up. I will be getting a page up on this project also in the near future.

Update 12/27/08 The new solar air heater has been completed. It took longer than I wanted but it is finished. There are things that I would do different in the next build but overall it is a good unit.

Here is a picture of the first day of operation. Not much solar energy going on here. It actually got worse from this point.

I will update the air heaters page with some build pictures when I get a chance.

Update 11/1/08 I now have over 5000 miles running biodiesel. I took it on vacation and aside from a belt failure that cut through the transmission cooling line, all went well. I went out to get fuel and the biodiesel pump was closed for the season. I have experienced gelling of the biodiesel and I have a few maintainance things I want to take care of so I am going to mothball the car for the winter.

Update 08/20/08 I have over 3000 miles running biodiesel and all seems well. It certainly does smell nicer. I never got the blob of black goop in the primary filter that I hear so many people talk about. This probably means that the previous owner took good care of the car.

I have also added another panel to my array making a total of 3 panels and 192 watts. I bought the panel and was waiting to build a mount for all 3 panels and decided to hook it up and place it at the base of the tower I have the other 2 mounted to. At least it could make me some power until I get it mounted.

I helped a person I met with his biodiesel processor. He had it mostly constructed when I met him. He needed some help with the electrical side of it. He had gotten a small programmable temperature controller and a solid state relay for it so he could power water heater elements. I took those and built a small control panel that he could mount to his processor to make things a little easier.

Update 05/07/08 Last night I finished installing the new Viton fuel hoses which are resistant to biodiesel. Tonight I pumped 16.5 gallons of B100 biodiesel into the tank on top of the remaining diesel and drove the 19.1 miles home from the biodiesel station. I calculate I have a mix of 78.6% biodiesel in the tank right now. Here we go.

My biodiesel project

Update 05/13/07 I have added a page that shows my low voltage lighting projects around the house that use my solar setup for power.

My lighting projects

Update 04/28/07 I have finished my drainwater heat exchanger installation. There is a link to the installation page on the links page or use the one below.

My drainwater heat exchanger installation

My Solar Air Heater with Solar Panel Mounted on Top. This is an excellent way to get heat from the sun into your house so you don't use as much oil, natural gas or electricity. This one pictured here will get me a 25 degree difference between intake and output temperature on a sunny day. Click the link below the picture for more information about solar air heaters.

Solar Air Heater Page

This is just one example of things that can be done by the average individual. I built this box and the test box on the solar air heater page. I am a terrible carpenter so if I can do it then almost anyone can. I chose this because it is simple and efficient and it was something I could do now to help reduce my oil consumption. While this one may not have made a big difference this year to my oil consumption, I learned alot and will continue to improve and expand this project. Since my main objective is to get off oil, making heat is my first priority.

However, a complete system that can extract energy from the environment no matter what the weather conditions is important. As an example, it is not always sunny enough to make heat using the solar box but if it is windy, as it often is when it is not sunny, electricity can be made with a windmill. This electricity can then be used to charge batteries, make heat with electric heaters, and hopefully make hydrogen to store for use later by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using a process called electrolysis.

Storage of energy collected to be used later is also important. While batteries can be charged with extra power and it is good to have some of that power immediately available as electricity, that will only get you so far and batteries are made from lead and sulfuric acid which are not very environmentally friendly substances.

Hydrogen is much more environmentally friendly and no more dangerous than natural gas. It can be burned as is to make heat just like in a gas heater or stove, used to supply a fuel cell to make electricity or burned in an internal combustion engine to turn a generator of some sort like a lawnmower engine hooked to a standard car alternator or even in your car to increase your gas milage.

You may think generating hydrogen is hard to do but I learned to do it in 8th grade science class and was making small amounts of it in the basement tonight before I wrote this. It is not as hard as you may be led to belive.

Biodiesel is another form of energy that is produced from vegetable oil from crops such as corn, soy and canola just to name a few. It can also be made from waste vegetable oil from deep fryers at local resturants making it very efficient since it actually gets used twice. Home heating oil and diesel are the same and can be replaced with biodiesel with almost no modifications to existing equipment. This could help reduce oil imports by a substantial amounts and the money would go to our farmers which would help our economy instead of the people we get it from now that "don't particularly like us very much".

I intend to share information on all of these methods and how to combine them into a complete system and automate it so you don't have to baby sit it. My links page will help to explain these different ideas and give you links to places where there is more information and equipment. Check back often as I am constantly experimenting and posting results.

The link below goes to an information page. Here I put links for Windmills, Biodiesel and Hydrogen (soon). These are all things I am going to try if I'm not already working on them. As usual there is more to come.

Links to information

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