The price of electricity in India has gone up substantially of late and the argument for eliminating incandescent bulbs has become even stronger. Scroll towards the bottom of this article to see cost comparisons for Bulbs, CFLs and Fluorescent Tubes.
Sustainable Design :: Energy :: Efficient Lighting

It’s been a while but I finally got this page uploaded. The [RaBV] bungalow has been completed and the clients are living there already. Teething problems are still being sorted out - rather slowly - by the local contractor and they should be done soon. more…

Found this article at Sustainable Design Update about Sintex Industries making a prefabricated biogas digester which turns waste and garbage into cooking fuel. Nothing new about the technology but constructing a tank has always been the biggest headache. Now, you can just get it ready-made and install it. According to this Fortune magazine article, it [...]

This is absolutely wonderful. When it comes to inexpensive, self-help construction, you can hardly go wrong with this extremely low-tech system.
See :: Earth Bag House in Haiti [via :: Sustainable Design Update]

Researchers at IIT Kanpur are working on a toilet design that will reuse water. The design is still under development but, if it works as advertised, it’ll be a good thing because the amount of fresh water flushed down the drain is dramatically reduced. The article at Down To Earth may disappear in the next [...]

I’ve been watching the much-talked-about Antilia building on Altamount Road come up these last few months and other than the architects, nobody seems to know what exactly is so green about it (apart from vegetation hanging over the side). Like many others, I’m convinced this is a major case of green-washing but, what I like [...]

Just a few days ago, a friend of mine emailed an article from the NY Times talking about Orange County in California treating their sewage and then piping it back into people’s taps. Conceptually, it’s the correct thing to do but the cost attached is much too high. Of course, this is not the first [...]

After being a while in the pipeline, The Energy Research Institute - TERI - released GRIHA, (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment) which has been developed keeping the Indian scenario in mind. GRIHA evaluates a building’s environmental performance over its life cycle and rates it based on a number of criteria. Now, the Ministry for [...]

UCLA has recently released a new version of a free software called HEED that helps architects in designing energy efficient homes. This supersedes “Solar” which I had tried a few years ago and been totally befuddled by. I’ve just given HEED a spin after downloading the climate data for Bombay (Mumbai) from the EnergyPlus site [...]

Learn how to make your own solar water heater with spare parts from the kabbadiwalla. It may well cost more than the claimed amount but it will teach you how simple the technology really is. Of course, if you want to store the water, you’ll have to make, or invest in, an insulated tank.
And [...]