The Evergreen Institute's Center for Renewable Energy and Green Building just announced the 2010 workshop schedule. The Evergreen Institute (TEI) offers training for educators, energy professionals, homeowners and individuals interested in pursuing a career in residential renewable energy or green building. 

The schedule includes numerous hands-on workshops at the TEI's educational center in Gerald, Mo. TEI also has off-campus locations in Kansas City, Mo., St. Louis, Mo., Boulder, Colo., and in Clarendon, N.Y. TEI teaches workshops in solar electricity, solar hot water, wind energy, passive solar heating and cooling, green building, natural building, and home energy efficiency.

To help those wishing to learn about these vital topics in the difficult economic times we're facing, TEI has reduced prices on many workshops and offers substantial discounts for early registration. TEI is also offering numerous free-workshops. The schedule can be accessed online at The Evergreen Institute.

I’ve been off TV for five or six months, working diligently day and night at my new educational center in east-central Missouri, The Evergreen Institute, where I teach classes on solar electricity, wind energy, green building, natural building and more. 

So, when I moved back to Colorado for the winter and had a few minutes of free time at night, I started to watch a little TV.

One of the first things I noticed was that the bulk of the car ads are extolling the virtues of big gas guzzlers, SUVs and big trucks. I’m hoping it is Detroit simply trying to dump their unsold gas guzzlers, but I fear it is their effort to persuade us — once again — that bigger is better.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that those ads featuring high mileage vehicles often “brag” about cars that get a whopping 24 to 30 miles per gallon.

I have two things to say about this situation. First, have we no memory at all? Have we all forgotten the economic kick in the pants that $4 per gallon gas delivered?

Let’s remember: As the global economy recovers, chances are gas consumption will rise, dramatically, backsliding us into the ugly, painful days of $4 a gallon gas. This, in turn, could stimulate another economic downturn.

Let’s use our brains for once. Don’t let anyone tell you that a car that gets 30 miles per gallon is fuel efficient.  Fuel efficient cars get 40 and 50 miles per gallon, even more. That’s the target we should be shooting for, and fast!  Let’s insist on it.

I’ve had an inbox full of suggestions for inexpensive streamlining of MAX, our 100-mpg, DIY car. Some of them are good, some are not so good, and a fair number of them are (to quote the Magic 8 Ball of my youth) “Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.” I won’t call automotive aerodynamics a black art, but when you get to a specific car, you won’t find all the answers in the textbooks. 

The problem is every part of the body influences every other part of the body. Like the parable of a butterfly flapping in Barcelona causing a hurricane in Costa Rica, a small difference here can make a large difference there. A small change in the radiator intake might generate a mild change in how air flows over the hood, which could make a moderate change in airflow over the windshield, leading to a significant change of airflow over the roof, causing complete flow separation at the rear window and a huge turbulent wake behind the car. The textbooks can guide you, but the only way you’ll really know what you’re getting is to test. 

As you regular MAX Update readers know, we got an involuntary do-over on body design about a month ago and we don’t have much time to fool around. We’re doing rapid prototyping and rapid testing and going back to the basics, back to how aerodynamic testing was done in ye goode olde days.

Now I hate to oversimplify, but as a general rule of aerodynamic drag, turbulence = bad; smooth flow = good. One way to observe the flow of air close to the body is to tape tufts of yarn on the car and watch which way they blow. It sounds a bit like the old “weather string” joke (if it’s wet it’s raining, if it’s moving around it’s windy, if you can’t see it it’s dark) but tuft testing has a long and legitimate history. In the nautical world, a tuft of yarn has been called a “telltale” since about the time yarn was invented. In our case, the problem is with tufts on a car body, how do you watch them? 

In a wind tunnel, you just stand there and look, but with a moving car it's not that easy. You can’t drive alongside in another car because the wake of your observation car voids the test. So I asked myself, what would Wonder Woman do? She had an clear airplane. Why not a clear car? 

I've taken out the passenger’s seat and paneled MAX’s right side in $10 worth of one-eighth-inch Vivak, which is transparent, thermoplastic sheeting and is clear, tough, and easy to work with. You can saw it, drill it, rivet it, bend it … and tape tufts of orange yarn to it. I’ll watch the tufts from the driver’s seat and see how changes in the front of the car (different fenders in particular) influence airflow in the middle of the car, and maybe I'll learn something.

Photo by Jack McCornack

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Check out the 100-mpg Car page for all things MAX.

I’ve been looking for a house recently, and learning all kinds of new things in the process. Lately, I’ve been learning about the home inspection process, and discovering that beyond the basic local requirements, there are some optional tests you can do, including testing for radon. The more I learn, the more I think that testing your home for radon is a good idea for just about everyone.

Radon is a colorless, odorless radioactive gas. It’s found in low levels in many homes, but some homes have higher concentrations, which are linked to an increased risk of lung cancer. You can test for radon with a DIY kit, or have your home professionally tested.

If your home does have elevated levels of radon, it’s relatively easy to find and fix the problem. And since that’s the case, why not go ahead and find out if your home has high radon levels? For anyone trying to create a greener, healthier home, improving your indoor air quality is a great place to start, and testing for radon is a simple step toward that goal.

For more information, check out the EPA’s very helpful website on indoor air quality, which includes a Citizen’s Guide to Radon. The EPA also had a video contest last year to educate people about radon testing. Here’s the full list of radon video entries. (See below for my personal favorite. These are dogs with a message.)

Earlier this month I visited Greensburg, Kan., and toured a few of its many green buildings. It was a great trip, and you can see more photos from my visit in this Greensburg photo gallery.

Background. Greensburg is the rural Midwestern town that was struck by an EF5 tornado on May 4, 2007. The storm was 1.7 miles wide — it killed 11 people and destroyed most of the town.

After the storm, the people of Greensburg made a commitment to rebuilding the town as a model green community. That effort is already well underway, and you can even watch its progress on TV. A Greensburg TV series on the Planet Green network is following the progress of rebuilding. The third season begins filming soon.

My visit.  Mother Earth News is based in Topeka, Kan., so Greensburg is relatively close to where we’re located — about a 4 hour drive — but this was my first visit to the town. I took a walking tour guided by volunteers from Greensburg Greentown, a community-based nonprofit devoted to helping Greensburg build green.

So what does Greensburg look like these days? Well, there’s still a lot of evidence of the storm, even more than two years out. As our tour guides explained, Greensburg used to be locally known for its trees, but now most of the trees are gone. You can see from one end of town to the other — the view is wide open. Most of the storm debris is gone, too, but there are still remnants of many buildings — a wall here, some steps there. But already many homes and buildings have been rebuilt, and many more are under construction.

There are nine different buildings on the walking tour of Greensburg (some you can go into, and others are just visible from the street). While there are many green features to see, I was struck by one recurring theme: concrete. Many of the buildings are being built with insulated concrete form walls (ICFs). In fact, ICF construction makes a lot of sense for Greensburg. Not only does it provide excellent insulation, the buildings are also structurally strong, and therefore very resistant to storm damage. From a green standpoint, one of the disadvantages of concrete is that it takes a lot of energy to produce. But in Greensburg, there are always more opportunities to go green — in this case by recycling concrete debris from the storm. The Silo Eco-Home in Greensburg is made of precast concrete, and 35 percent of that concrete is recycled from local storm debris.

Another noticeable fact about Greensburg: There are renewable energy systems everywhere, especially on the new city buildings. The arts center has wind turbines, city hall has building-integrated solar panels, and many buildings have renewable energy systems that are not readily visible from the street, including rooftop solar panels and underground geothermal heating and cooling systems.

If you want to visit.  For anyone who’s interested in renewable energy or green building, Greensburg is a great place to visit. You can simply walk up and down Main Street and see numerous examples of eco-friendly building in action, and even more green buildings are planned for the future. One exciting project is the Chain of EcoHomes being planned by Greensburg Greentown. This project is designed to help visitors understand the green options available to homeowners.

If you’re in the area, don’t miss the chance to stop by and check out what’s happening, and be sure to check in with Greensburg Greentown for more information about tours. You can also download their self-guided tour booklet for much more information about the green features of individual buildings.

This is more of a “downdate” than an update, but I thought you’d like to know what happened. We suffered a thrilling daylight burglary on Friday morning, October 9. OK, it wasn’t all that thrilling — we left Kinetic for breakfast at 9, came back at 10, and the door was open with the lock broken off. “Golly,” I said to my secretary, although not in those words, “I wonder if anything’s missing.”

Not much, actually: two laptop computers, two briefcases, and one external hard drive. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well it was bad, because Friday is Backup Day, in which we back up our laptops with each other, and back them both up with a hard drive we keep at a secret location 10 miles from the shop ... except during work hours on Fridays when I watch that backup drive like a hawk and add the week’s work to its archives ... except during mealtimes, when we leave our work at the office.

So we were backed up solid, ready to restore from any computer crash, even ready to recover from any burglary, any fire less than 10 miles long (hey, we’re in the Oregon woods, we’ve seen worse) and most natural catastrophes, provided any of this didn’t happen on Friday between 9 and 10 a.m. (breakfast) or 1 and 2 p.m. (lunch). As you would guess, a whole lot of MAX data is (was) in electronic form, such as all MAX’s test results to date, and all the new body part drawings.

I’ve spent the last week looking for a silver lining to this cloud, and indeed I’ve found one: Now we get to work with a clean slate. For example, the “new” body (other than the roof) was designed over two years ago, and all the parts painstakingly rendered, ready for manufacturing. I’ve learned a bit more about automobile aerodynamics since then, but it was too much work to change the drawings if I didn’t have to. Now I have to. I may have even learned a thing or two about testing since MAX hit the road. Now I have to run those tests over again. And since I absolutely hate doing the same work over again the same way, I’m dang near guaranteed to do it better the second time.

Mind you, I’m not yet ready to send the burglars a thank you note. But chances are MAX will be slightly improved by this ordeal. And me? I’ll probably be slightly improved too, since I won’t be squandering my evenings in pool halls and movie theaters any more. I’ll be slaving away in my garret, drafting new MAX drawings on my replacement computer — the one handcuffed to my wrist, of course.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Check out the 100-mpg Car page for all things MAX.

Cheerful, albeit exhausted solar decathletes are headed home this week after 21 days of excitement on the National Mall.

For the second decathlon in a row, Team Germany took first place, impressing judges and peers with their SurPLUShome, which used the maximum building dimensions acceptable by competition standards. In addition to first place overall, Team Germany was  recognized for excellence in the Architecture, Lighting Design, Comfort Zone, and Hot Water contests.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took second place with Gable Home, a small home intended to pay tribute to its cultural roots while integrating advanced solar technology.

Team California’s Refract House took third with its innovative design and excellence in Architecture, Communications, Engineering and Market Viability contests.

Check out the video below to see Team Germany’s reaction when the Solar Decathlon 2009 winners are announced.

To get the whole story on this year's Solar Decathlon, take a look at these previous updates.

It's Almost Time for the 2009 Solar Decathlon
The Houses Leave Home
The Little House from a Big Town