Micro hydro?

With all this rain, we bought ourselves a rain barrel. For a few bucks at Ocean State Job Lot, we got a 150 gallon barrel and set it up in time for the latest deluge. It was full by noon the next day.

All the water flowing off our roof got me thinking about how much energy could be produced if you funneled it all through a turbine. It seems like it should be a lot (picture the energy involved in dropping a full 150 gallon barrel off of a two story building). My rough calculations for a 1000 square foot roof, two story building, with 50 inches of rain annually (Worcester county) is 1 3/4 kWh.

A Google search turned up some patent applications, but nothing concrete...

Insulating the attic

insulation
Originally uploaded by mandy&john

We foolishly failed to insulate the attic before last winter set in. We chose this weekend to try to fix that. We bought 22 bales of cellulose and rented a large heavy machine to blow it into the floor. Having hauled everything up to the attic, I noticed the instruction suggest leaving it outside and using the hose to get the insulation into the attic. Oops.

Ah well, what's done is done. So far I've got 2/3 of the fiber in and am nearly 3/4 done. We'll see how much less oil we use this year. It'll be interesting.

Small Town

I took Christopher down to the library this afternoon and on our 4 block walk, we passed 3 groups of people. Everyone stopped to say hello. Even the mom parked in a car full of kids talking on her cell phone stopped long enough to say hi. It's really a nice feeling.

March started with a few inches of snow, but most of it melted within 12 hours. It's been pretty nice out for a couple days and Christopher just wants to run around out side. On our way back from the library we stopped for a wagon ride around the yard. He collapsed into a pile of tears when I told him it was time to go in.