[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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