Archive for October, 2009
New Power, Old Lines, New Problems
When gas spiked above $4 per gallon in Portland last summer, the city’s already bustling bicycle boulevards clogged with new riders, creating unprecedented bicycle traffic issues. As reported in the Oregonian, it appears the same basic problem has hit the power grid, with Eastern Oregon’s new wind turbines butting up against an antiquated power grid. [...]
Retrofitting for Wood Stove Heat
If you’re seeking to heat your entire home with wood, you would benefit most from a free-standing stove… A fireplace-inserted wood stove –like ours, which sits inside the fireplace, as opposed to in-front of it– will not effectively heat your whole house unless you have a centrally mounted fireplace and ensure that the insert is extending beyond the hearth…
Leave A Light On For Me
In 2006, I received a packet of neighborhood watch information from the Office of Neighborhood Involvement (a division of the City of Portland), which included an interesting report on home burglaries and night-time illumination. Essentially, the report indicated that a nationwide survey of police department records showed that in those cases where a break-in was [...]
Food Fight
The Oregonian’s Nikole Hannah-Jones recently published an article outlining Multnomah County’s new 15-year food initiative. The county seeks to design a program that will enable the region to locally grow a significant amount of the food that county residents eat. Organizers hope to make this food more affordable and accessible, helping residents move away from [...]
Orenco Drives
In today’s Oregonian, Dylan Rivera reports that professor Bruce Podobnik just completed a study gauging social interaction among residents of urban and suburban areas. In his paper, Podobnik reports that a majority (two of three) of residents at Orenco Station, the award-winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, drive personal automobiles [...]
Use Less, Savor More
This was a big week for the Towsey-French household as we not only completed the second phase of our heating system upgrade (the first phase occurring in 2007), but we also added a major insulating blanket directly above the majority of our primary living space. We hired a highly recommended firm, Air Tight Insulation, who [...]
Bear Bricks Back in Action
We’ve been burning bear bricks on and off for about two weeks now (mostly in the late evenings), so we were able to warm up most of the house to about 72 degrees today without ever tapping into our B100 biodiesel. This is fortunate because today is the day that we replace our furnace heater [...]
The Daily Environmentalist
The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices is just as valuable today as ever. The value of this book lies in its deceptive simplicity. The authors somehow manage to clearly provide the necessary insight to help anyone get a grasp on their environmental impact, and then make a simple plan for effectively reducing said impact…
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