Thank You Forbes

The highlight of our week was our visit to the Forbes House on Moscow mountain. Lahde, Mike, Rennie and Owen live in a sustainable house at the base of Moscow Mountain. Mike Forbes led a tour showing us how they conserve electricity, built an energy efficient house, and use rainwater instead of ground water.

Mike first showed us the rain catching system. He uses his shed's roof to collect the water. He said that this area averages 28inches of rain a year and that is plenty of rain for his family to survive off. He took us into the water storage area. He has four large tanks that holds 6,000 gallons of water. In the winter time, there is so much rain they actually have to dump extra water. In the summer their tanks are a little lower, but they don't typically go below 1500 gallons of water. He's currently installing an old above ground pool to hold another 20,000 gallons to irrigate their garden and orchard.

Their solar panels work on a net meter, therefore they are still connect to the power grid. As their solar panels absorb energy from the sun, it powers the house and charge their battery. If they have extra energy it is sold to the power company, and when the Sun is not shining they purchase energy from the power company. Conceptually they should break even, selling energy in the summer and purchasing energy in the winter.

They also use passive solar heating through their house's windows, which means they purposefully angled their house to maximize the sunlight coming through windows in the winter and minimize the sunlight in the summer.

The house is heated using a masonry heater which is similar to a wood burning stove, surrounded with brinks, and the bricks absorb the heat as the fire burns. The heat in the bricks slowly heats the house and maintains the temperature around 68F for the entire day. The students liked this the best, since they were freezing after standing outside.

Overall the house was built with purpose, wise choices and passion. Each detail was considered, methodically created, and it is a beautiful house. Their three main goals was to create a house that was sustainable, to share the love for sustainability, and inspire others. They wanted to recycle as much material as possible, use no toxic materials, and purchase local materials. Mike said its great to buy local not only because it is better for the environment, but it is nice to employ your friends, neighbors and community members.

Personally I was blown away, the students learned a lot, and I think we all felt privileged to be able to visit.

One Man's Trash!

This week a lot of things happened. Thursday we all went to the recycling center and learned a large amount of things that most of us didn't know before. One of the awesome things that we saw was a machine that separated the aluminum cans from any other materials that weren't aluminum such as tin or steel cans. The machine used a magnetic conveyer belt that didn't stick to the pop cans. We learned how they conserved space by taking all of the paper and using a baler which made the paper take the form of something like a hay bale. If they didn't use the baler, then they wouldn't have very much space to work.

Also everybody got to go in one of the inner offices and sit on a rug that was crocheted out of textile scraps, we saw art that was made from everyday things like soda cans and bottle caps. On our way there we also experienced something new we all took the city bus to the recycling center, but we walked all the way back.
On Tuesday the 7/8 crew took out all the trash and recycling from all the classrooms at 9:35 in the morning and put it all in the appropriate places. The next day on Wednesday at the same time in the morning as the day before, we had prepared ourselves with science goggles, masks that looked like they belonged on surgeons, and latex gloves. Then we all went to different appointed areas and collected the 24 hours worth of trash and recycling from the entire building. We went through everything that was collected and sorted it into different groups like Food Waste, Garbage, and Recycling. There were also other more specific groups, but after our crew sorted out each group we weighed everything and put the amount in lbs on the board. Some of the things that were in the trash were pretty disgusting but all of us survived digging through it all.

Afterwards we learned that our masks and safety gear scared some of the much younger kids pretty badly, having them stopping and running in the opposite direction to get away from the "scary monsters" that we looked like. Monday we didn't have a field trip and worked on Lit. Circles, reading our favorite place stories, and the first day of a ultimately healthier lunch that tasted much better than the school district lunch that we had before. Today, on Friday we were going to go to a dairy farm but that got cancelled, so we have been reading to the kindergardeners and finishing our Lit. circles and trying to finish our energy pamphlets.

University of Idaho

Hello Folks,

As you might have read earlier today from Karl's blog post, we had a full week at the 7/8 PPSEL CREW. The week started off with some service. We had the chance on Monday to help the Kindergartner's with their alphabet books, and on Tuesday we helped out the 1/2 crews with their Me as a Baby, Me Now writing assignment.

A large part of our week was taking our expedition knowledge and creating energy information pamphlets/ brochures. There were three targets:

• I can explain how we turn this energy source (ex. coal) into an usable energy (electricity).
• I can identify the positive and negative impacts of this source of energy.
• I can explain how the U.S. utilizes this energy source.

On Thursday Chelsea, a Natural Resource Management Master student from U of I, came into our classroom and lead a lesson on sustainability, nonrenewable and renewable energy sources. It was very interesting and leads us into our second case study. Energy Sustainability, Conservation and Efficiency.

This week we also had Carly, an U of I freshman and aspiring art teacher, come in and give us a lesson on graphic design. We created recycling ad posters.

Today we walked down to the University of Idaho Steam Plant for a tour. Scott the plant manager helped us answer our three guiding questions for the fieldwork.

• How is steam energy transfered?
• How is steam based heating more effecient than electricity?
• How could we use this technology to heat cities?

It was pretty amazing! First we toured the area where local scrap wood from local mills is brought into the plant. The wood is taken out of the waste stream, which means that it was headed for the landfill. The wood is burned to heat boilers full of water. The water is turned into steams which heats all 86 buildings on campus. The steam is also used to heat all of the 86 building's water. Its effecient for three main reasons:

• It centralizes the steam production in one facility, instead of individual boilers in each building.
• Its costs $1.5 million to purchase the wood necessary to run the plant, and it would cost between $10-15 million to heat the buildings using electricity.
• Its carbon neutral: The carbon dioxide generated equals the amount of carbon dioxide necessary to grow the same amount of trees.

Overall it was a super week, and we are excited to learn about composting and recycling next week with a visit the recycling center and U of I's composting area.

Stay Tuned!

Mr. E

So I; the omnipotent karl, am doing the blog this week. I wasn't able to grace the school with my presence for the first 3 days, so I will have to go by word of mouth that we worked on our energy pamphlets on Mon.,Tues., and Wed. Friday we went to the UI steam plant in which we discovered the plants not exploding depends solely on the operator not having a seizure, falling asleep, pushing the wrong button (especially the big red one), and/or texting his girlfriend... Personally I fear for humanity, but thats just me. In other news we now have art class every Friday. Currently we're making recycling posters. Mr. Ellsworth won't let me use an exacto knife. This perplexes me greatly. When have I ever given him reason to doubt my maturity?Soon enough though my plan will come to fruition, and I will rule SUPREME!! Until then I will be using this strange human creation called... blog.

Until next time future minions, Karl

Reactions and Reactors

This week in the seven and eight class we went to the nuclear reactor in Pullman and we saw a lot of interesting stuff. Then the crew went into a room were they control the reactor and make sure everything is going correct. When we first went into thereactor we had to go through a metal detector. - McKenzy

In normal class, aside from field work we did a cool combustion lab, where we lit a candle, set it in a jar, and observed. We observed how it burnt with open air, with tin foil covering the top and, with holes punched in the tin foil. We had our first fire drill

of the year; it went smoothly.

- Savannah

Unfortunately we could not take the camera into the Nuclear Reactor Center, and we failed to get pictures of the combustion lab. So I found this gem of a picture from our staff training.

-Mr. Ellsworth