Another great selection of green vids from my favourite YouTubers, yes, ‘Hippy Shopper’ is back. The smallest green things we do in our every day lives, when added up, will make a huge difference to our environment, and give it a fighting chance at recovery. Though realistically, at the moment, it’s really all about damage limitation. But that has to come first. The world will not go green overnight, but I do think the green movement is gathering some not inconsiderable momentum.
Look out for my post soon, on a green company, which I’m happy to say, I’m involved with, and which has just won the coveted ‘Green Apple Award’.

Fuel Saving With ‘Low Gas’.

For the last couple of months I’ve been doing a practical trial on a fuel saving product called ‘LowGas’, which to be honest, even though many of my colleagues in ‘Breeze’, and a local taxi company, had positive results, I was still very sceptical as to whether this product would produce the goods.

It seems, and I’m not going to be cautious about this because the practical facts do not lie, ‘LowGas’ does actually do what it says on the box.

I have a 4½ year old Vectra I.9ltr Diesel. My mileage before fitting ‘LowGas’, from full to the fuel light flashing, was consistently around 530 miles. After fitting ‘LowGas’, there was no discernible improvement for two tank full’s, then the mileage range gradually began to creep up over the next 3 tank full’s, to just over 580 miles from full to fuel light flashing. As I use my car for the same journey every day, with hardly a deviation, i.e. To and from work, which is a good mixture of town and country driving, I can definitely say that there is an improvement of around 50 miles per tank full. This is too large an improvement to put it down to varying factors. So, with the price of fuel here in the U.K., and with the monthly mileage I cover, and once the ‘LowGas’ device came up to speed, I had a return on my investment inside a month. I don’t know why the device takes a while to come into full effect, but that seems to be pretty standard.

‘LowGas’ is remarkably easy to fit. It consists of a series of magnets inside a heat resistant sheath, which is wrapped around the fuel line, and held in place by a couple of tie wraps. That’s it.

‘LowGas’ costs £15 here in the U.K., which is £25 cheaper and much more compact than its nearest rival, and comes with a 60 day money back guarantee.

To sum up, ‘LowGas’ does produce the goods, is extremely easy to fit, is cheap, and is not intrusive to the engine. Fifty miles per tank full is not a massive saving, but it is a saving that cannot be ignored. Of course, the saving will vary from car to car, but talking to other ‘LowGas’ users, 30 to 50 miles seems to be about the norm. The local taxi company I mentioned, has a fuel saving of 50 miles per tank on all of its cars, which really speaks for itself.

I’m not affiliated to ‘LowGas’, but that doesn’t stop me from extolling its virtues. Every fuel saving device that does actually save fuel and by that token, eases the strain on our environment, must have an airing.

Bio Fuel. What’s New.

So, we may now have another contender in the biofuel market. Though contender is probably the wrong description, because if biofuels ever become the norm, and I think that in South America biofuel is an everyday fuel, then it will be produced from several different sources.

I have come across two related articles on the possible use of waste Water Melons as a source of biofuel, which makes sense, because valuable land is not taken over specifically for growing biofuel crops. I would think that most waste fruit could be used to produce oceans of biofuel, because the amount of fruit wasted every year must be phenomenal. You can click through to the second article here; convert rejected fruits into biofuel.

Now we have a number of renewable fuels vying for the title of the ultimate fuel to power our industries, and our domestic lifestyles. Personally, on the domestic front, I think, and favour myself, that the power of the future will be good old electricity. Certainly electrical power makes sense for our domestic vehicles, because that power can be acquired cheaply and easily. Also for our household use, electricity is to be had in abundance, and can also be acquired very cheaply and easily.

HHO is gaining ground, but I don’t se it as a long term option. In fact HHO and biofuels may be just a stop gap, and they do have one big drawback, they need to use combustion to convert their power into motion, which is really a very inefficient medium.

Actually my money is on electrical power, as the power that will ultimately take us into the future. As long as our Sun shines, we shall have an abundance of power, more than enough to power our planet for as long as we can see into the future. By the time our Sun finally expires, in about a billion years, and if we survive that long, and don’t kill our planet without outside influence, then the chances are that we will have moved on by then, though whether to a state of utopia is debatable. I have to admit, that looking at the state of mankind at the moment, utopia isn’t going to be any time soon, so it’s just as well we have a billion years to get it together. Does our planet have a billion years? With us at the helm!? Well, I do have my doubts.

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Are Rejected Melons the Next Form of Renewable Energy?

Thu, 08/27/2009 – 2:00pm by YumSugar
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A colossal food fight is one way to use up the season’s supply of subpar produce. But scientists have discovered another: convert rejected fruits into biofuel. The study, conducted by USDA researchers and published in the journal Biotechnology For Biofuels, found that the 360,000 tons of fruit rejected by US retailers each year could be converted into roughly two million gallons of biofuel.

Research team leader Wayne Fish said that 50 percent of the fruit, which is typically left in the fields and not sold due to cosmetic imperfections, is fermentable into ethanol, which can be used as fuel, “We’ve shown that the juice of these melons is a source of readily fermentable sugars, representing a heretofore untapped feedstock for ethanol biofuel production.” I’d never considered that fruit could be a viable source of renewable energy — but I find it refreshing (although perhaps not as refreshing as, say, an In-Sandíary).

Are you surprised to hear that watermelon could have potential past the typical Summer barbecue?
Source: Getty

Low Energy Lighting. The resistance.
Ok, let’s do another visit to low energy lighting.
A couple of my colleagues the other day were incensed that in the U.K, very soon, there will be no more incandescent light bulbs on sale, by law, so both these guys went out and bought dozens of these power guzzlers.
Now, in my [...]