Vertical Garden with Reclaimed Gutters

"When Suzanne Forsling moved to Juneau Alaska from Iowa, she found that it was a little bit harder to get her garden to grow.  Frustrated by cold soil, scarce sunlight, hungry slugs, root maggots, porcupines, cats, bears and ravens she got resourceful.  She got her crops off the cold ground and into the light by afixing gutters to the wood siding of her house on the sunny side and using them as planters."

Original Link: DYI

Heating Homes - with Mirrors

"Practical Solar wants to bring solar thermal home, but in a somewhat unusual manner.

The company has created a system for harvesting heat from the sun to heat up a house. It plants heliostats – i.e., metal poles festooned with an array of mirrors – in your lawn or a nearby patch of real estate. The mirrors collect heat and then beam it into your living room.

A computerized control system guides the heliostats to maximize the harvesting of heat.

Although you'd think that something like this might sell best in the South, where it's hot, Practical is mostly targeting New England. It's the region where people need to heat their homes.

Solar thermal water heaters have been used to replace or supplement home water heaters or pool heaters for years. A number of companies – Sopogy, Chromasun, Millennium Solar and others – now want to expand how solar heat can be exploited.  Chromasun, for instance, has a device that collects solar heat to run air conditioners. Some other companies use the heat for fluid pipe heating systems." 

Read the full article here: Heating you home with Mirrors!

Visit Practical Solar's website here: Practical Solar

Building Houses with Loofahs in Paraguay

Award winner Elsa Zaldivar and colaborator look over the new building material

Taken from The Rolex Awards for Enterprise:

In the poverty-stricken countryside of Paraguay, a landlocked country in the heart of South America, an innovative social activist has found a new use for an old vegetable. Elsa Zaldívar, whose longstanding commitment to helping the poor while protecting the environment has won her deep respect in her native land, has found a way to mix loofah – a cucumber-like vegetable that is dried to yield a scratchy sponge for use as abrasive skin scrubber – with other vegetable matter like husks from corn and caranday palm trees, along with recycled plastic, to form strong, lightweight panels. These can be used to create furniture and construct houses, insulating them from temperature and noise. About 300,000 Paraguayan families do not have adequate housing.

Follow the link to Read more!

Link to full story and Video (English)

Loofahs drying

Prototype structures