Compliance Checklist: Will You Be Ready if OSHA Visits Your Jobsite? - Remodeling Magazine

Below is short a list of things contractors should consider if they want to be ready when an OSHA Inspector drives by and or stops in to check out your job site.  This list comes from Mark Paskell of The Contractors Coaching Partnership.  Mark helps contractors and their employees comply with OSHA. He offers group training classes as well as company specific training and assistance with compliance requirements including jobsite practices and the gamut of required documentation.  When I spoke to Mark about this topic he stressed that OSHA was concentrating heavily on worker training and protection from fall hazards, and that contractors needed to have written documentation of the training they provide.

 

OSHA Compliance Checklist for Contractors:

• Keep your job site in a clean an orderly manner
• If on roofs above a 4 pitch use anchor points, harnesses and lifelines
• If you do not use harnesses use guard rails
• When setting ladders make sure they are 3 feet above the roof edge and on stable ground
• Don't use ladder jacks with ladders over 20 feet
• If you use ladder jacks over 10 feet makes sure you are tied off from above
• Wear hard hats and safety goggles
• Make sure scaffolding is set properly with planking
• Set ladders at the right angle
• Don't climb scaffolding bracing
• Don't use the top steps of your step ladders
• Use ladders and step ladders only within the manufacturer's parameters 
• Use guard rails on pump staging and do not forget the ends
• Cover skylights in the work area
• Always us guard rails on landings, stairs and ramps
• Use guard rails across large openings on upper levels
• Don't set ladders or staging within 10 feet of power lines

http://soc.li/oyRGDFh

Compost Tea Recipe-

Inoculate Your Organic Garden With Microorganisms

Compost Tea Recipe

Examples of good microbe foods include molasses, kelp, fish, humic acids and rock dust. Obviously, these products shouldn't have preservatives in them, because preservatives are designed to kill microbes.

Here’s an organic compost tea recipe I've adapted and evolved for a five-gallon homemade compost tea brewer. This takes one to five days to make. We don’t really know when it’s done if we're not testing it, but two to three days is a good time frame to start. The compost tea ingredients are:

• 4-8 cups good, aerobic, nice-smelling, fully finished organic compost
• 2 Tablespoons unsulfured blackstrap molasses
• 2 Tablespoons organic liquid kelp fertilizer
• 1 Tablespoon organic liquid fish fertilizer

A good batch of compost tea can be a miracle worker when it comes to fulfilling your organic gardening goals. It's a microbial inoculant to improve your soil food web, broad-spectrum organic fertilizer to foliar feed your plants, and even pest control (although it can't legally be called that).

And this simple compost tea recipe is all you need to get started. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know below.

Want More Info? Article Continues at the following link.  

Compost Tea Recipe To Inoculate Your Organic Garden With Microorganisms

Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com

Uncomfortable truths about air conditioning

When record heat hit the Midwest last summer, most of us didn’t sweat it out.

We just made our air conditioners work a little harder.

Stan Cox worries our year-round preference for cool, dry air is creating an unsustainable feedback loop. Our reliance on air conditioning contributes to global warming, which increases our reliance on air conditioning, which increases our reliance on air conditioning, and so on.

Cox is author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World. 

The 2010 book traces how air conditioning has reshaped the country and lowered our ability to adapt to climate change.

I spoke briefly with Cox last month about the challenge we’d face in resetting our collective thermostat.

“We’ve built ourselves into a corner,” Cox said. “We’ve built countless square feet of interior space that are uninhabitable without air conditioning.”

Offices built before the 1950s often had H-, T-, and L-shaped footprints so inhabitants were never far from a window. Air conditioning allowed architects to do away with that constraint, designing buildings instead as giant cubes.

Opening windows for a cross breeze just isn’t possible in most large, modern office buildings.

With homes, the introduction of air conditioning prompted builders to cut out extra insulation and other energy saving features that helped make pre-AC homes more comfortable.

Recent building code updates improve energy efficiency, but they don’t address the most important factor: size. We’re building more efficient homes today, but for decades we also moved into larger and larger homes (a trend that only slowed after the housing market tanked in 2007.)

Cox describes a 2005 study from the Journal of Industrial Ecology that compared three homes: a large, energy efficient home, a small efficient home, and a small inefficient home.

“The authors concluded that a 1,500-square-foot house with mediocre energy-performance standards will use far less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house of comparable geometry with much better energy detailing.”

And that’s the problem with efficiency:

“Efficiency first tends to make frugality seems less necessary,” says Cox.

There is no single solution. Cooling ourselves more sustainably will probably require a combination of broadening our comfort zone, increasing efficiency and improved building design.

“It’s not going to be that easy because air conditioning is kind of an all or nothing thing,” says Cox. ”It’s not easy to build a building that can run part of the time really efficiently with air conditioning, and another part of the time be comfortable with natural ventilation.”

Uncomfortable truths about air conditioning

 Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com

Fracking “FRESH” Act Stinks of Dirty Money

MAY31

Karen Showalter

The oil & gas industry has once again bought favor from Congress.

The Fracturing Regulations are Effective in State Hands (FRESH) Act will remove the federal government’s authority to regulate the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Introduced in the Senate in March 2012 by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and in the House by Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX), the measure will place control of fracking on both state and federal lands in the hands of states. To date, nine Senators andtwenty-six members of the House of Representatives have co-signed their respective versions of the measure.

Co-Signers of the Act in both the House and the Senate have taken almost 4x as much money from the oil & gas industry than the average sitting member of Congress, analysis using the Dirty Energy Money database shows.

The average co-signer has taken over $433,000 during their tenure in federal office, while the average member of Congress has taken just under $112,000.

Co-Signers have taken over twice as much money from the industry – an average of $37,000 – in this 112th Congress as the average member of Congress, who’s taken $17,000.

Let’s pause for one second and recognize that it’s a problem that even those who have not supported the FRESH Act are taking money from the industry. Our decision makers should be listening to their constituents, not special interests.

Back to the issue at hand. Why is this a problem? Fracking is a hugely controversial practice that directly impacts the lives and health of local communities. Putting the power to regulate the industry solely in the hands of states is irresponsible. Here’s why:

• States certainly have an important role to play in regulating fracking, as do local communities. However this industry is booming, and state regulatory efforts are not growing fast enough to stay apace. Colorado has drilled over 43,000 wells in the last ten years; Ohio has issued 126 new drilling permits for the Utica Shale in the first 5 months of 2012 alone. The rush to drill leaves many local inspectors scrambling to keep up. A recent study by Earthworks highlights the inadequacy of Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, for example, a state-level mechanism in one of the hottest fracking zones in the country.
• More broadly, we cannot ignore the critical importance of federal regulation of common goods like air and water. Air and water cross state lines and therefore require federal oversight. Someone living in West Virginia deserves just as much protection as someone living in Wyoming.
• If the industry thought States would do more to protect citizens and hold industry to account, they would not be pushing for this change. Removing federal oversight means less regulation, more pollution.

The FRESH Act helps one group only: the industry. We must continue to demand that our decision makers listen to the interests of their communities, rather than the special interests funding their election campaigns.

Lauren Pagel of Earthworks contributed to this post. 

Fracking “FRESH” Act Stinks of Dirty Money



 Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com

Sharp achieves solar cell efficiency record of 43.5%

Sharp Corp. announced it has achieved the world's highest solar cell conversion efficiency of 43.5 per cent using a concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell.

Sharp said the basic structure of this latest triple-junction compound solar cell uses the company's technology that enables efficient stacking of the threephoto-absorption layers, with InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide) as the bottom layer.

These solar cells are used in a lens-based concentrator system that focuses sunlight on the cells to generate electricity.

Sharp successfully capitalized on the ability of this cell to efficiently convert sunlight collected via three photo-absorption layers into electricity, and also optimised the spacing between electrodes on the surface of the concentrator cell and minimised the cell's electrical resistance, the company said.

The measurement of the world's highest concentrating conversion efficiency (43.5 per cent) was confirmed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany.

Compound solar cells have been used primarily on space satellites due to their high conversion efficiency. However, the company aims to apply this latest development success into concentrator photovoltaic power systems that can generate electricity using small-surface-area solar cells and make them practical for terrestrial use.Sharp achieves solar cell efficiency record of 43.5%

 Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com

Great News for Windows with R30+Attributes

Light 12-Glazed Window on the Horizon

By Preston on May. 31, 2012

In the USA, most windows are probably single- or double-glazed and some builders will use triple-glazed windows for Passive House and other high-performance homes.  But in Hanover, Germany, a 12-glazed window prototype by Mariusz Paszkowski and Antoni Kostka was the star of the recent International Passive House Conference, according toDer Standard.  Check out these windows with aerogel!

The two scientists, in conjunction with SUPERWINDOWS, showcased INVIS160stackand INVIS160tweed, and both of the prototypes are about 160 mm thick, though they weigh no more than a double- or triple-glazed window unit.

INVIS160stack (above) is an insulated glass unit with two external glass panes that sandwich 10 layers of specially coated film without materially compromising visibility.  The inventive window makes it possible to achieve European U-values of 0.15 W/m²K, or the U.S. equivalent of R38 (R = 1/(.15/5.678)).

INVIS160tweed (below) is similar to INVIS160stack except that what’s sandwiched between two glass panes is several layers or sheets inclined at a 45-degree angle (as opposed to parallel to the external panes).  This approach makes it possible to achieve European U-values of 0.05 W/m²K, or the U.S. equivalent of R113 (R = 1/(.05/5.678)).

Of course, there’s a lot of work and investment to be done before these are suitable for commercial production, so there’s no pricing or availability yet.  But watch this space for window innovation.

[+] More about SUPERWINDOWS in development in Cracow, Poland.

Credits: SUPERWINDOWS.

Subscribe for more: Daily RSS | Weekly Email | Facebook | Twitter

Article tags: international, SUPERWINDOWS, window

Light 12-Glazed Window on the Horizon




 Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com

Infographic: Home gardening in the U.S. | MNN - Mother Nature Network

As more and more Americans grow their own fruits and vegetables, MNN digs up some dirt on this DIY food revolution.

Infographic: Home gardening in the U.S. | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Mon, Jun 06 2011 at 10:55 AM EST

 74

 

Also on MNN:

• A guide for the first-time gardener
• Easy vegetables to grow
• How to protect urban gardens from air pollution
• 5 delicious garden-to-table recipes
• See more MNN infographics

 Thank you for stopping by St Louis Renewable Energy. Feel free to comment in the section below or contact Scotty for any Home Improvement Projects or Energy Reducing Needs and Scotty, Scotts Contracting will respond ASAP. Company Web Address: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com