Sunday, July 19, 2009

SolaTube skylight, free light for dark areas

Finally got around to installing this solatube, it has been sitting in our garage for two years. Since this is a roof project, we used a installer familiar with doing this. We keep wanting to turn the lights off in our hallway/stairway, as the light is so bright.

Before:


And after ( this time the images were both taken with manual exposure, same settings, same time, around 1 pm) :


I'm told this Solatube puts out the equivalent of 300 watts, most likely during the midday hours. It puts out light as soon as the sun rises.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Growing edible landscaping in and/or outside the office

If you work in a traditional complacent environment, you'll find it hard to convince people to grow edible landscaping on the building grounds. That will probably take time. So the next thing you can do is find less obvious spots, perhaps behind signage, or behind buildings, or on top of your building. Chat with the grounds keepers about it, they are closer to the earth, more likely to understand.

If that all does not work, how about right in your office or cubicle? This surely is your space, and you should be able to grow an edible plant in that location. Some of the things growing in my office currently..

Cucumber.
Bell peppers grow in northern climates in the winter in an office with south facing windows.
Cayenne peppers and chives.

Eventually even the stubborn people will start realizing it makes sense to swap ornamental petrochemical dependent landscaping for edible landscaping. Edible and beautiful, you can have both!