Our eco life

A few weeks ago, our garden shed was moved from the site of our rental property up to our lot. It was rather muddy and the truck got stuck rather severely. Here are some pictures ... The truck arrives ... aaaaand gets stuck! We try adding some plywood ... Voila, that worked a treat! The truck moves to the back of the section, and the crane is mobilised ... Straps are placed around the shed, ready for lifting. We have lift off! ... and a smooth landing. ... and now, we're REALLY stuck! We try everything, including giving the big truck a small hand with the Pajero. It doesn't budge! So we get the pickup truck in on the action! and PULL!!! and ... erm ... snap! BTW, that was a 3-4 tonne rated winch cable, the winch was pulling both the Pajero and the pickup truck towards the bigger truck (which was trying to push forward), and all the driving wheels were spinning on all vehicles! It was impressive to watch. The kids w...

A few weeks ago I went to a Biogas workshop which was held in an area not far from us. Here we learnt how to make a bio digester using commonly available materials. For those of you who may not be aware, a Biogas digester is a device that is used to generate biogas (a mixture of methane, CO2 and hydrogen sulphide) from organic waste material. Biogas can be used for cooking, heating, lighting or even running a heat engine to generate mechanical or electrical power. About 2kgs of organic waste material is required to create about 1m3 of biogas. This could run one average size cooking burner for about 3 hours. It depends on various factors - some waste streams can generate far more gas than others, and some anaerobic bacteria better at producing methane than others. For the sake of this article, the above approximations hold roughly accurate. The digestor has two main components, the digesting compartment (bottom tank) and the gas collector (top tank). In some cases these two tanks ar...