It comes right out of the tap, you can get it bottled, it makes up 65% of a human, and it’s essential for life. It’s water, and getting clean water is essential to your good health.

Most people don’t worry a lot about their water, and when it comes to off-grid, more people are worry about solar or wind systems. Water is often forgotten.

The PureMaster V-750 is a home water filtration system, giving you pure filtered water, not in a jug or a bottle, but right through your normal taps.

The PureMaster uses 7 different stages to filter water.

The first is a prefilter, filtering out larger contaminants and particles which could clog the later filters.

Next, the redox potential stage chemically alters inorganic particles into harmless substances such as chlorine.

The next five stages are actual filtration. Two of these are “macro filtration”, which use granular activated carbon to filter out larger contaminants and impurities. The next two are “micro filtration”, which also use activated carbon, but on a smaller scale to target smaller contaminants. The final stage is “sub-micro-filtration”, providing even finer filtration using activated carbon.

The PureMaster boasts no reduction in water pressure from using the system. The “EvenFlow MaxContact”, besides being cool corporate-speak, is a fine screen after the filtration stages.

It’s designed to provide greater water distribution by allowing the water to filter through the entire diameter of the filtration system. Not only does it allow for no reduction in water pressure, but it allows the filters to be more effective at filtering out contaminants.

The PureMaster product page provides a list of the contaminants it filters out:

Completely removes or significantly reduces Chlorine, Chloramine/Chloramines, sediment, cysts, copepods, VOCs, SOCs, THMs, PAHs, trace heavy metals (i.e. lead, mercury, or iron), MTBEs, atrazine, benzene, xylene, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, tastes, odors and hundreds of other potential contaminants and harmful chemicals from the water entering your business or home

The PureMasteruses NSF certified filter media, and will last for about 7 years, or 750,000 gallons of water.

While this does not make you off-grid, it certainly allows for filtering of water from sources such as rainwater collection.

The biggest benefit of this system is that it provides filtered water to all your faucets. You’ll be getting filtered water not just in your kitchen, but in your shower, in your laundry, in your garden hose, and even in your toilet as well.

You won’t have to worry about re-filling jugs, and most importantly, you won’t be tempted to turn to bottled water, which as we all know, is almost as bad for the environment as driving a convoy of hummers around.

Equinox Products provides phone consultations as well to make sure you’re getting the right product for your needs.

You can order it or get more information from the product page.

Popularity: 29% [?]

 This is the CIS Photovoltaic system, a huge leap forward in home solar systems.

The CIS has uses new battery and solar technology to reach an unprecedented 0.9 year payback. That means this system will pay for itself in less than a year!

This is less than half of traditional solar systems.

In addition to a quick payback, the CIS system is much more eco-friendly than other systems. Yes, it does does produce 100% green power, but the system itself uses 1/100th the materials used in traditional batteries.

This means much more green manufacturing.

The CIS system uses a stepped design, modeled after traditional Japanese roofs.

Unfortunately CIS is a Japanese company, and their product website is also in Japanese. We’ll let you know if this system gets picked up by english retailer so you can get more information.

via Good Design Awards

Popularity: 20% [?]

Bamboo is becoming an interesting eco-friendly casing material, replacing the traditional plastic.

We’ve already covered the bamboo LCD monitor, and bamboo flash drives, but it doesn’t stop there!

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Bamboo Ecobook

This is the ASUS EcoBook, the world’s first bamboo laptop.

It uses bamboo panels instead of traditional plastic covering. Bamboo is more sustainable and less toxic than plastic, and it makes the laptop look a lot warmer and much more classy! Bamboo is also biodegradable, and each of the bamboo panels can be removed and recycled separately.

In addition to a great green material for casing, the ecobook also features a “PowerGear” button, which will glow green or red depending on the amount of power being used. Great for helping to reduce your power consumption.

The Bamboo ecobook is set for release in 2008, we’ll let you know when you can get your own!

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Bamboo  Keyboard & Mouse

So if you’re not quite in the market for a new (bamboo) laptop, you can at least replace your old keyboard and mouse with some eco-friendly alternatives.

These computer peripherals, from Nigel’s Eco Store, are cased in 100% green bamboo. All unnecessary plastic has been replaced with bamboo, which is biodegradable and can be recycled.

The keyboard sells for £17.99 from Nigel’s Eco Store.

The mouse sells for £14.99, again from Nigel’s Eco Store.

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Bamboo LCD Monitor

The bamboo LCD monitor is styled n the same way as the keyboard and mouse (they look great together!).

It is cased in bamboo, and comes in 15″, 17″ and 19″.

You can read our whole review of the bamboo LCD monitor here

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Bamboo Flash Drives

These eco-friendly flash drives are sold by farfromboring as promotional items.  You can order these in bulk, engrave your company logo, and leave a lasting green message at any kind of promotional event.

These flash drives are cased in panda-friendly bamboo, and are another product that helps to keep toxic plastic out of landfills.

Read our full review.

Check them out at farfromboring.com.

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Bamboo TV 

If you’re in the market for a new TV, or just want it to match all of your other eco-friendly gadgets, there is a bamboo-cased TV as well.

It’s a 19″ widescreen TV, has a resolution of 1440 x 900, a contrast ratio of 700:1, and and 8ms response time.

You can pick this one up for $474.58

(via engadget)

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Well with all these products you can certainly take another look at the traditional plastic coating that seems to plague our electronic devices.

All of the bamboo featured in these products is panda-friendly, meaning that you are not taking any vital food or habitat away from pandas, and that any panda are treated ethically.

Bamboo is a 100% green material. It’s biodegradable, recycleable, and a fantastic alternative to plastic.

Popularity: 27% [?]

 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

Popularity: 26% [?]

 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

Popularity: 21% [?]

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

Popularity: 34% [?]

 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

Popularity: 14% [?]

 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

Popularity: 34% [?]

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

Popularity: 20% [?]

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%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 14% [?]