We’ve seen a bunch of electric and hydrogen powered bikes, all assisting your normal peddling with some green energy.

Up to now however, all of these have been running on a kind of limited fuel. Batteries die, hydrogen gets used up. This limits the range of the bike.

Well “Ther-a-Products” has come up with the answer. A hybrid human/solar powered bicycle. This bike uses solar panels to charge an on-board battery, providing you with a theoretically unlimited range. As long as you’re in the sun, you’ve got unlimited green power.

The battery is a 17 amp hr. battery, allowing you to store energy for riding at night or when it’s cloudy.

The battery is a 500watt, front-mounted battery, providing a maximum speed of about 30kph. Of course, you can peddle as well providing even faster speeds.

This is a fantastic idea for green transportation, and saving big cargo loads, could replace many of your car trips. Parking is free, just like a normal bike, and you won’t be paying for gas. Gas is free!

You can get the bike straight from the manufacturer for $1295, or as a kit for $795.

via Keetsa

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 In the last post we talked about Stefani Water Purifiers. While researching their site, I came across one of their other products: a water bottle with an integrated water purifier!

This is Stefani’s Filter Bottle, and is one of those products that begs the question, why didn’t someone think of this sooner?!

The Filter bottle is an 18oz water bottle with a Stefani water purifier right inside. You can fill it up anywhere and get the same filtered water as you would from your jug at home.

The bottle is filled from the bottom, with a screw-cap, and it starts filtering as soon as you squeeze the bottle. A large pre-filter prevents any larger materials from ever entering the bottle and clogging up the purification system.

The purifying filters will last to produce about 100 gallons of water, and is the best alternative to bottled water I’ve seen so far. This filter bottle eliminates the need for bottled water entirely, and even has some additional benefits.

Besides saving the environment from millions of plastic bottles, the filter bottle allows you to re-fill your bottle like a standard water bottle, but also gives you the pure filtered water of your home water purifyer. It’s portable like bottled water, but since you can re-fill it, there’s no need to carry 2 or 3 around on a hot day.

Saving the environment was never so convenient.

You can get the filter bottle for only $34 from Stefani.

via Stefani Water Purifiers

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Bottled water is everywhere right now, and I have to admit it’s convenient. Unfortunately, it’s terrible on the environment. All that plastic, all those shipping and transport trucks, just for something that comes right out of your tap.

Well if you’re not a fan of straight tap water, have a look at water purifiers. They’ll give you the same great tasting water like the bottled kind, but are a lot cheaper, and a lot more green.

Stefani Water Purifiers are a great, natural way to purify water. They use “natural gravity feed water purification”, which is basically just running the water through several filters and purifiers. The filters are “silver coated dechlorinating/sterilizing ceramic filters”, and contain activated charcoal.

Activated charcoal helps remove things like chlorine, bacteria, lead, viruses, fungus, and whole lot more. The company claims their filters will remove a whole bunch of common contaminents, check out the list:

99.9% Bacteria
99.9% Amoeba
99.7% Copper
99.6% Lead
98.5% Chlorine
99.4% Iron
99.4% Zinc
97.0% Bromoform
95.0% Dichlorobromomethane
94.5% Aluminum
93.0% Chloroform
93.0% Dibromochloromethane
92.0% Dieldrine
87.0% Lindane

While I’m not sure what half of those are, I’m glad things like chloroform and dichlorobromomethane are going to be removed from my water.

The most important message here is to cut back on bottled water. Get yourself a water bottle and a water purifier.

via Keetsa

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 Refrigeration has always been a tough one when it comes to being green. Memories of CFCs, huge power bills, and the like surround the essential appliance.

While some might argue just how essential a wine cooler is, this mini-fridge uses a new form of refrigeration, called “Thermo-Electric“.

No toxic chemicals are used, and there are very few moving parts.

It’s temperature range is from 46-66°F (+/- 2°F).

Another eco-friendly aspects of this fridge is the window, it double-paned to help reduce heat loss. It also provides UV protection for those super-expensive bottles.

You can get it from amazon for $159

via Really Natural

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 One downside of riding a bike is the lack of a stereo. Sure, you’ve got your iPod, but it’s not quite the same.

There’s nothing quite like blasting some tunes in the summer with the windows open, and yes, I know that’s not the most eco-friendly thing to, but sometimes you just can’t help it!

Well now us bikers can take part too. Meet cy-fi,  the world’s first wireless bicycle iPod speaker. The system is only about 3 ounces, and broadcasts to wireless speaker (1 included) that mounts to almost any frame.

I thought it interesting that they mentioned the system supports up to 4 speakers through “multipoint broadcasting”. Could this mean surround-sound on your bike? We can only guess at this point.

This is a pretty sweet way to pump the tunes on your bike, but I’d really like to see a way to power the iPod through something like peddle power or solar. The company website reports the device only has a battery life of about 6 hours.

You can pre-order this for $149.95 from mycyfi.com.

via engadget

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I sometimes wonder how even vending machines stuck just outside the middle of nowhere, still have reliable electricity and someone to come stock them regularly.

It’s bewildered me to this day, but lukily, I’ve found a possible green solution to one of my questions.

This is an example of a solar powered vending machine.

No plug required, thesolar panel on the top of the machine keeps the refrigeration going 24/7, using on-board batteries for nighttime of cloudy periods.

It’s amazing to think just how vending machines there are out there, all actively keeping drinks cold, all the time. Luckily they don’t lose cold when you get a drink, unlike your kitchen fridge, but there’s still an awful lot of energy being used by these machines.

If they could all be solar powered, not only would we reduce energy load, even companies and retailers would see the  financial benefit of taking a big power-hog off their grid.

A lot of public electronics are leaning toward green energy lately, as we’ve seen with solar powered streetlights and bus shelters.

The article on Treehugger brings up a great point as well. With not plug as a tether, already obscurely-yet-conveniently-placed vending machines could go whole new places, such as the side of ski hill!

This is the future people, an ice-cold coke halfway down your favorite double-black-diamond.

While the company website gives me absolutely no faith in the quality of their products specifically, the idea is fantastic, and I truly hope we see this catch on with the big distributers.

via Treehugger

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The Kill-a-watt is a home energy monitor designed for assessing how much electricity a certain appliance or electronic uses.

Unlike some other home energy monitors we’ve covered, the Kill-a-watt monitors one outlet, not your entire home. This allows you to see how much electricity a certain appliance or set of electronics uses by plugging them directly into the outlet on the front of the Kill-a-watt.

The screen will be right above the outlet, so it’s not exactly convenient for long term use either, however this is not intended as a permanent monitor anyway.

Assessing your appliances or electronics can help you locate sources of power drain by selectively plugging in suspected culprits. One advantage over full-house energy monitors.

The Kill-A-Watt comes with a bunch of analysis features as well. It allows you to forecast how much an appliance or electronic is going to cost you based on it’s current wattage. If you do want to use it  in a permanent location, it has a cumulative kilowatt-hour monitor as well. It’s accuracy is rated at within 0.2%.

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