Ever heard that if you want something done, to do it yourself? When it comes to carpooling, I’d agree full on. As much as you wish your employer or city had a carpooling system to take you to work and back and save you some green in the process, it’s probably not going to happen on its own.

Green Living Online editor Shelagh McNally even wrote up a how-to guide for you. So get your fanny moving, start a carpool, and cut your carbon emissions today.

Tonight, my volleyball team will be using 2 cars instead of 6 to get to a game that’s 27 Km from where I live. See how many cars you can get off the road the next time you go somewhere.

Resources

Car Sharing and Carpooling Services in Canada

Trip Driving Cost Calculator - Gives you directions, a map, the fuel cost for your trip, and a cost comparison with other car models.

Pickuppal.com

We’ve cheered on the creative and efficient dome home design in recent months, and have now discovered a truly unique variation that’s sure to turn heads. Innovative company Solaleya was spotted at recent West Coast Green Festival by Inhabitat writer Chris Worrall. Solaleya is the creator of the dome house that, wait for it - rotates to follow the sun.

Yes folks, you’ve heard of rotating restaurants and dance floors. Now, you can actually order and live in a house that slowly spins to take advantage of passive solar heating and natural lighting opportunities. The domes come with a remote control allowing you to orient your picture window to the view of your choice.

Framed with FSC-certified wood and insulated with cork, Solaleya’s design presents a number of eco-friendly benefits. Unfortunately, each unit is pre-fabricated in France, requiring that it be shipped overseas to the construction site. But here is a design for living that can respond to the seasonal angle of the sun. That’s an impressive concept by any standard.

Solaleya Dome Home Video

Like a few other carbon calculators-gone-social, BBC’s Bloom site presents 50 carbon-fighting actions from line-drying your clothes to traveling by train. With Bloom’s actions, you can see how many other users have pledged, learn more about the impact an action will have, and invite your friends to pledge with you.

The best fun to be had here is to cruise through Bloom’s flash-animated collection of actions represented by colourful beans placed in a spiral. Watch the bean sprout and bloom when you adopt an action. Sure, the site’s a bit UK-centric, but us Canucks never seem to mind. British accents and lingo are a ceaseless source of amusement for many of us.

If you’re motivated visually, check out Bloom today. Raising Spaces also recommends World Wildlife Fund’s Canadian version The Good Life. It tracks your carbon emission reductions with each simple action you take while allowing you to challenge your friends to some friendly carbon cutting fun.

We tore down the house at 9805 - 84 Avenue about 45 days ago, and Peter Amerongen and Habitat Studios have made a lot of progress since.

The very beginning was quite stressful due to some difficult neighbour relations, but we go through that (for now). In the meantime, our foundation is poured and backfilled:

and the framing is well underway:

Adam the framer frames the double-walled exterior walls. Once filled with insulation and sealed, they will provide an amazing R56-rated resistance to heat flow to the outside.

The east and west walls completed, with a pile of reclaimed two-by-fours from the old pink house that Adam and Nick, the framers, will reuse as backing.

Rim detailing: Adam seals the gaps between boards to reduce air movement around the floor rim. This rim would normally remain exposed, leaking air for the entire lifetime of the house.

Adam finishes the rim detail by stapling a strip of Tyvek over the floor rim board. Attention to details like this, which Adam and Nick are very conscientious about, is very hard to come by in Alberta’s slap-it-up-quick building industry trades culture.

The framing is probably the most revolutionary part of this NetZero Home, which is ironic because it adds the least amount of cost compared to the other innovations. Insulation and good sealing have no moving parts - they will save energy 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and never break.

The second floor should be done by the end of this week!

(Cross-posted at greenedmonton.ca)

One of the things we noticed when we plugged in our new chest fridge was the amount of condensation we were getting inside the fridge and how useless the little drain hole in the bottom was. To be fair it IS supposed to be only for draining water when defrosting…

It got so bad that we were actually getting a little bit of rust forming at the seams inside the compartment! Needless to say this wasn’t a very healthy turn of events for either us (possible mold) or the fridge (rust).

I got to looking around the internet and turned to the home brew forums to see what the kegerator guys who led me to the Brewer’s Edge controller had done for their keg chest fridge’s when condensation happened. Many said you would have to wipe the inside down and eventually replace the appliance when rust ate through the coolant tubes, but others said they had good luck with a product called Damprid that sucked moisture out of the air. Exploring further it turned out that Damprid is merely calcium chloride which is used for road salts in some places and for chlorine free pool treatment as well and can be had at much lower prices in large quantities than you pay for the name brand products.

I went out to Home Depot and found a 1KG bag for $6 and made a holder out of two ice cream buckets inside each pother with holes in the bottom of the top one to let the brine that develops when the calcium chloride absorbs moisture drain into the lower bucket. Within a few days of putting it into the fridge the beads of moisture that coated the inside of the fridge were gone and all surfaces were bone dry!
It seems there are many lessons to learn from those inventive home brewers!

(cross-posted at greenspree.ca)