Thanks to rain barrel sales and many hours of donated labor, we purchased a digital projector for doing slide shows and videos in fall 2008! And we can now offer customized educational workshops on sustainabilty themes for high school classes, scout troops, church groups, or other community groups that do programming for teens or young adults. Since the fall we have developed two major projects with help from interns, volunteers and community partners: Recyclique and the Feed My Sheep Community Garden project. See pages specific to those projects for details . . .
We also worked with Marion Brisk's mini-term class at NC School of Science & Math to build a solar space heater -- see the video students made from their experience. Testing the heater's efficiency comes next.
Solar Hot Water Lab: We are networking with a team of community volunteers, solar installers and high school science students for a 2-phase project. Phase I is to install a solar hot water system for Carolina Biodiesel, which will heat vegetable oil (speeding up the reaction that produces biodiesel), and serve as a demonstration module on site for future educational purposes. In the process we'll learn about the physics and hands-on skills of solar hot water systems. Phase II of the project is to build and test a low cost "appropriate technology" solar hot water system with the goal of making the technology more widely available. Chris Allen, is helping to pull a team together to work on this in spring 09. In May we moved around the corner to a new site on S. Goley St., but this project remains an option at the new site!
