[Greenbuilding] neat idea
Erin Rasmussen
erin at trmiles.com
Mon Jul 25 20:46:46 CDT 2011
Are we talking about the video where the guy in Brazil was using water in plastic bottles to make low cost lights for the old lady's bathroom?
I thought it was neat because it took a waste product and made something useful out of it. Close examination of the video shows that it is the bottle its self that is making the seal - not a goop. Sure they don't last long, but they are free. In fact, they are common garbage pretty much everywhere. And I thought the camera film cap helped keep it working a little longer.
You've got a point about the roof peak, but if you are lighting an old lady's bathroom you have to punch a hole where the bathroom is. :-)
So it's not the best solution, but it's free, and people don't generally start thinking of the best solution until there's an imperfect solution that could use some improvement.
Cheers,
Erin
-----Original Message-----
From: "RT" [Archilogic at yahoo.ca]
Date: 07/23/2011 12:57 PM
To: "Green Building" <greenbuilding at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] neat idea
Punching crude holes (and I do mean crude ... you try cutting a neat,
round hole into corrugate steel with only rudimentary hand tools) into
those perfectly serviceable sheets of steel to accommodate a plastic
bottle (whose useful service life is a few years at most due to
degradation as a result of full exposure to UV) , and having to goop up
the steel-to-plastic junction with honking big gobs of gooey glop to
create a joint that is doomed to failure in the short term ... didn't
strike me as being as an idea I'd want to foist upon anyone.
I think that the "designers" would have been well advised to have spent a
bit more effort thinking the idea through a bit further (if at all)
acknowledging the fragility and short service life of the plastic bottle
and perhaps designing a properly flashed/sealed sleeve into which the
bottles would fit, allowing for easy removal and replacement of the
bottle, perhaps even replacing the plast-echhhh! bottle with a glass
bottle.
Even then, I don't think that I'd design the bottle lights so as to
require punching a hole through and ruining the sheets of steel. I think
that I'd look at maybe leaving either a gap at the ridge (if a peaked
roof) or simply leaving a gap between sheets of steel, and then devise
some way to use the water-filled bottles to weather-proof the gap.
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot C A >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit REPLY)
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