Solar Hot Water Installation
As part of my quest to reduce my carbon footprint and because I love technology and tinkering with systems, I decided to install a solar hot water system in my home. Several years ago, I helped start a solar company here in Georgia and as part of that startup, I was...
I'm a fan of sustainable food. If the Mapawatt Blog was a University, my undergrad would be in Sustainable Living, my Masters in Energy (conservation, efficienty, renewable, etc.) and my Minor would be in sustainable food/farming. While Mapawatt's focus is reducing fossil-fuel energy in...
Solar Thermal Diagram
The following post on solar powered differential temperature controllers for solar thermal hot water heating systems is written by Guy Marsden. I was so impressed with his sustainable living habits that I wrote a blog on him back in October. Guy runs the website Art Tec...
Get the furry family members involved!
I love saving energy in my home. My wife is a little less enthusiastic on this topic. This difference in "energy saving passion" occasionally results in disharmony in our household.
Like the time I turned down the water heater temperature and "helped" her...
Yes, that's right, Bill Gates is copying Mapawatt. He just started his blog (The Gates Notes) and Mapawatt has been around for almost a year now, so ipso facto he must be copying us. Ok... so I'm just dreaming, but I am excited to see his new blog, which has a large focus on sustainability and...
It seems that in the last year solutions available for residential energy monitoring have exploded. Luckily this is Mapawatt's "bread and butter". The boom in popularity has a lot do to with the flood of products hitting the market for people to track and control their energy usage (see a...
Thanks to a comment the author posted on a blog I wrote, I had the fortune to discover the great energy savings blog Energy Boomer. While perusing the site I discovered this article on using a meat thermometer to save money on hot water. This simple yet ingenious idea is a great way to determine...
Blower Door Test
A key step to understanding how you use energy in your home is doing a home energy audit. An energy audit usually means you walk through your home and analyze all the systems that impact how you use energy. There are two ways to approach a home energy audit: finding a...
Here puppy, puppy
A friend recently sent me an article on Yahoo! covering a new book called "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living". While I have not read the book myself, based on the review I don't really want to. The review (which came from the Associated Foreign Press...
I can't believe it took me this long to learn about Jetson Green, but thankfully I have and I was able to see their list of 62 Innovative Green Homes of 2009. It is an extremely comprehensive list of the green homes they have covered over the last year. I appreciated the fact they had a picture...
The last few pages of any magazine are chock full of advertisements that sound too good to be true, and Popular Science is no exception. For example, I recently covered Edenpure and Sunheat Infrared heaters. Both of these heaters (they're nearly identical) had advertisements in the back of...
Renewable Energy is my passion. My background is in software development but I also have experience in biofuels and solar energy. After analyzing several ways to get myself off of petroleum, I am now undertaking converting an existing internal combustion-powered car into an electric daily...
2009 was a good year for Mapawatt blog. This blog was born in the middle of February of 2009, and in less than a year we have already:
made many good contacts in the "clean energy" blog/website space
became the number one hit on Google for our "Magniwork" article uncovering a "free energy" scam...
Off-Grid Serenity
There are two main things you will need to focus on if you want to live off-grid: using less energy and figuring out how you are going to cleanly produce the energy you do use.
In a recent post titled Fossil Fuel Reduction strategy I covered the three components of reducing...
I've done it. I've solved Climate Change. Well, not really, but unlike the world's bureaucrats that really didn't accomplish much in Copenhagen, I have an idea on what the solution is. Copenhagen was about a bunch of politicians getting together so it looked like they were doing something to slow...
Fossil Fuel Reduction Strategy
There are three ways to prevent pollution due to dirty, fossil-fueled energy from entering our atmosphere: efficiency, conservation, and clean energy. To some this is very obvious, but sometimes it helps "energy novices" to go over the differences so they can...
TED 5000, EnergyHub, and Shaspa
Last night I was flipping through January's Popular Science and my eyes lit up on page 24. The title was "Knowledge is Power" and the topic was web-connected devices that track household electricity usage. If you've read our list of Energy Monitoring companies...
There are two types of cars that get powered up from the electric grid: The Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) and the Plug-in Electric or Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV). What's the big deal with plug-ins you ask? Well, they're bringing us one step closer to getting off gasoline (and middle-eastern oil)...
One of our goals at Mapawatt is to be the online community for home energy conservation, efficiency, and clean energy production. Part of building that community involves individuals sharing their home energy habits in order to help others, learn from others, and start the discussion on how we...
Smokestack external force
If you've been reading Mapawatt Blog for awhile now you may have noticed that we don't discuss Climate Change all too often. Our goal is to give solid advice for the causes of energy and water conservation, clean energy production, energy efficiency, and sustainable...