Upcoming
Appearances
...I am willing to make another 'lecture circuit' around the santa fe schools this year. Contact me if you want to book me to lecture at your school!
In the News/Events
Nov 30th, 2011 - Guest Lecture to group of students and sponsors at Santa Fe High School that are going to be designing and building a vehicle for competition in the high school 'Electrathon' race series. They have some awesome body shop and welding skills at SFHS, some grant money, local sponsors, and just need a kick start understanding options for EV design considerations based on what class they choose to compete in.
Oct 12th, 2011 9:30am-11:30am - Guest Lecture a 2 hour session for the SFCC class - ALTF 111 – Alt Fuels and Advanced Vehicle Technologies.
March 24, 2011 - Guest Lecture 1 hour for a 4th grade class at Wood-Gormley Elementary. A little young, but they get the basics and are ENTHUSIASTIC! Spent a half hour talking through basic 'electricity/energy' concepts, and a solid half hour crawling all over the car and explaining everything to a very interested class....
March 1, 2011 - Guest Lectured a 2 hour class for the SFCC class - ALTF 111 – Alt Fuels and Advanced Vehicle Technologies. Spent about an hour and a half talking through the design considerations, and a solid half hour crawling all over the car and explaining everything to a very interested class of 15 or so people.
Oct. 24,2010 - Show'n'tell for Zappy at the 'Lead your Revolution' fundraiser while I do their bike ride. This is a great group to build personal motivation and DO SOMETHING to be a little greener...
Oct. 24,2010 - Show'n'tell for Zappy at the 'In Our Own Backyard' 350.org Event at Elder Grace Senior CoHousing Community, 3466 Cerrillos Rd. They are showing some PV, Gardening, Water harvesting, composting, plan to do a community car-share, and more...
Oct. 4th, 2010 - Guest Lectured a 2 hour class for the SFCC class - ALTF 111 – Alt Fuels and Advanced Vehicle Technologies. Spent about an hour and a half talking through the design considerations, and a solid half hour crawling all over the car and explaining everything to a very interested class of 15 or so people.
Oct. 2nd,2010 - Participated in the Santa Fe Solar Home Tour. Showed the PV to EV connection and did show n tell to whomever came on the Tour...
7/13/2009 - Did a little show and tell at a Children's Summer Camp... video footage is really fun!
7/4/2009 - Won 'Best of Class' for Special Interest autos in the Santa Fe Vintage Auto Club car show.
4/25/2009 - Recipient of the 2008 'Sustainable Transportation Project of the Year' award from the city of Santa Fe. There is a nice little article on the City Website.
2/16/2009 - Charging Ahead with Energy Independance, in The Santa Fe New Mexican
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This site will be a growing collection of 'green' project information intended to help the average person make a difference... One household at a time. Topics include: send email to your Congressmen to support the PACE program we worked so hard to get in place. In case you don't know, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their regulators at FHFA are now standing in the way of people who want to take advantage of the PACE loan program to install Solar on their homes... we need to tell Congress this is not ok! There is a group set up with a huge amount of information at PaceNow.org to do just this, and there is a simple letter template that will send email to the right congress-people based on your zipcode. Click [here] to go there now! For those of us lucky enough to live in New Mexico... The weather is good enough to bike and walk to work and school almost year 'round. The trick of course is to live close enough to make that practicable, or be willing to combine biking and walking with some other form of mass transit like bus or (if you happen to live handy) the train. For lots more information on Carbon Footprint, and why it is important, visit 350.org, and if you want to figure out what YOUR household footprint is so you can identify areas you can reduce, visit terrapass.com or carbonfootprint.com for easy calculators adding up your impact from house, transportation, and even food choices... buy local goods when you can!
Key FAQS:
My first conversion, a 1997 Suzuki Swift (Geo Metro) donor car, 
became an operational EV on 3/1/2009 with just 138 hours of labor! This site includes some general information you will need to learn more, a collection of good links, and LOTS of details in a photo gallery I built along the way.
The initial conversion cost about $6000 for all the parts and $1600 for lead-acid batteries, plus a 'Donor' car. This vehicle uses about $1 of electricity per 50 miles to operate. The other 'consumable' is the batteries themselves, which will need to be replaced after about 2 years for lead-acid, or 8-10 years for Lithuim. The operational cost will be less than ICE when the price of gas is over about $2.75 per gallon using the new LiFePO4 chemistry (depending on how long the batteries actually last and how much maintenance and oil change and other maintenance costs would have occured with an ICE car over the same period)... I'll be happy either way, enjoying my quiet, non-polluting, solar-powered EV!
'Zappy' the electric car goes 2 to 3 miles per kWhr 'at the plug'. So would kick out only about .5#CO2/mile if I used PNM generated electricity (40% coal, 20% nuclear baseload generation), but with my PV system, its ZERO ! [click] to see more about how to convert your own! 
If you have lots of sun.... install PV! It can be hard rounding up the cash to invest, but it pays off moderately well, and feels REALLY good to watch that meter spin backward as you reduce you carbon footprint! In NM, there is a tax credit, and combined with the Federal tax credit, 30% of the the initial expense can be recovered the first year (with a cap of $11k for TY'08). My contract with PNM locked me into getting REC credits for $.13/kWhr, AND your meter spins backward if you are producing more than you use at the current (2011) rate of about $.09/kWhr. What it boils down to is similar to about a 4% yeild on a 'safe' investment like a CD. Click to [see more...]  I have a couple simple things I do to conserve or re-use water. I don't go to any big efforts to collect water from my roof because the trees around my house need it! Rather than capture and store it, I have created rock-filled trenches from downspouts and Cannales to act as mini-arroyos directing roof water to trees, and shallow basins around trees to hold the water long enough to soak in. Another form of water I 'redirect' is the drainwater from my laundry in the summer. My house is on a slab, and retrofitting gray water capture would not be easy; what IS easy is to get a brass fitting and hose clamp from the hardware store that has a hose thread on one end and fits into the drain hose. Then I just run a hose out the door. Soaker hoses do not let the water drain fast enough, but drilling holes in the last 10 or 20 feet of a cheap hose and capping the end works pretty well.
Please pardon the 'ugly' website... even though I do design and maintain websites for a living, I literally do not have time to put a lot of time into aesthetic appeal for this site. Perhaps down the road I'll be able to come back and make it pretty, but for now; I hope you find useful information and some degree of inspiration to continue your own effort to 'be green'. - Dan Baker |