Sustainable homestead; Energy Department fails own energy audit; Toyota to sell electric charge stations; Hack a hand-crank flashlight; Cooler LED bulbs

The Field Lab – Extremely Sustainable Homestead. The Field Lab, also known as the Southwest Texas Alternative Energy And Sustainable Living Field Laboratory, is a 40-acre desert homestead where John Wells decided to make his sustainable homestead dreams a reality. After purchasing his land 2 years ago, he built this little house in 8 days for $1,600. It was habitable but needed a little detail work which he completed in about 5 months and for another $800.

Energy Department Fails its Own Energy Audit. This is so very, very sad. The US Department of Energy, who is in charge of spending over $38 billion in energy efficiency funds, has failed their own energy efficiency audit. How, exactly, can we trust them to help the rest of us out?

Toyota to start selling electric car charging stations. These will be the public charging stations that I hope will start showing up everywhere around the US eventually, but for now they will be only in Japan. This is because Japan is getting a plug-in Prius later this year, and we have to wait a bit for them here.

Hacking a hand-crank flashlight into a battery charger. Seeing as how I have a few of these around the house, this is pretty cool. I can see bringing one camping with me to charge my iPhone and maybe my other flashlights.

A New Way to Cool LED lights. Progressive Cooling Solutions is taking a Russian technology for keeping satellite electronics cool and bringing it down to earth to cool LEDs. In what I can only explain as something way over my head, this sounds pretty cool – “a silicon membrane with pores about 5 microns wide and 500 microns deep…The idea is to transfer a device’s heat to a liquid, turning it to vapor, then carry it in a tiny pipe up to a couple of meters away to a condenser that turns it back to liquid”