firewood archives - planet forward - 克罗地亚vs加拿大让球

heliostat home heater

fri, 01 jun 2012 07:00:23 +0000

a heliostat is a special mirror with a guidance device that can keep sunlight reflected toward the same target all day without straying off-target. it is just a mirror but you need to keep it trained on the same spot for it to work. it is a bit like a telescope with a tracking device, so that you don’t need to move your telescope every minute or the moon or jupiter will move out of your sight as earth rotates. well, the same thing happens to solar energy when the sun moves across the sky and the heliostat must keep readjusting itself to keep the beneficial sunlight trained toward the intended target. as far as the intended target goes, it can be anything that you want. it can be much hotter or just warm enough to heat the interior of your home. in my video, i hope to give you a rough idea of how a heliostat works. i see great promise for solar energy by ideas like this; solar energy is much more than just converting sunlight into electricity or charging batteries.

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are environmentalists missing the smoking gun on pollution?

sun, 17 jul 2011 10:30:48 +0000

why are we still burning firewood without any smog controls at all?

we seem to forget that there are way too many of us earthlings burning firewood, crop wastes, ranch clearings with fire permits from governments, etc. some environmentalists are trying to argue that firewood is not a sequestered carbon source meaning that it has a short life cycle unlike coal which was trapped in the crust for zillons of years. i think environmentalists have lost touch with reality as far as carbon is concerned. smoke is not healthy to inhale, period! otherwise, we should enforce far stricter air pollution regulations on fireplaces, wood stoves, crop wastes, ranch clearings than present.

we are still too easy on firewood. they should not be treated any differently than automobiles, diesel trucks, coal power plants, smokestack industries, etc. soot and particulates float and end up lodged deep into everyone’s lungs. no wonder our healthcare costs soar! medicare is going broke and no financial wand can fix that until we start fixing the disgusting firewood smoke and related sources like crop wastes and ranch clearing burnings right away.

what are the environmentalists really thinking? forget sequestered carbon — all carbon is the same. ban them all! every bit helps! money talks!

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solar mirror space heater

sat, 14 may 2011 09:30:03 +0000

most of us are so focused toward converting sunlight into electricity that we overlook the biggest residential energy user of all – home furnaces, space heaters , even air polluting fireplaces and wood stoves. my idea is not going to replace them entirely but can do the job every bit as good whenever the sun shines. if it is foggy or raining, we can always go back to the old standbys. if the sun is shining, turn them off and switch to my idea that uses simple mirrors to reflect sunlight through windows and even sliding glass doors. we can borrow the suntracking mechanism from the solar tower with those heliostats all around it and retrofit with mirrors so that we don’t need to go out and readjust the mirrors every hour manually. mirrors doesn’t need to use any glass panes as there are already new kinds of mirrors that reflect as effectively as the glass mirrors. there are already some kind of mylar based reflecting surfaces that using bright aluminum coatings. silver can be used as well. we are too focused on producing kilowatts from the sun , but we can also focus on producing btus (british thermal units) as well. nearly all utility ratepayers usually pay for both fuel and electricity. some use natural gas, heating oil, firewood, etc which is measured in btus not kilowatts. some of us do have electric furnaces, water heaters, of course. generally speaking, it is far cheaper and more efficient to convert sunlight into btus with reflective surfaces than kilowatts with photovoltaics. people don’t seem to grasp that simple concept of producing btus from the sun very well. this is the real dilemma with our solar energy picture. solar thermal technologies are already everywhere , but they are not being marketed efficiently. photovoltaics which are far less efficient and far more aggressively marketed at greater costs to our governments through much heavier paid in tariffs and subsidies. solar thermal technologies will use aluminum extensively , yet we are not using it as much as we should. there are already excess inventories of idle aluminum lying around in the ports. what is going on?

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