Off grid living






Blooming Futures worked along side the Low Carbon Network to help deliver the Brighton Earthship Project.

As an organisation we have looked into a number of off grid solutions and are keen to come up with a domestic heating and power solution that is as low impact as possible.

Our areas of research have been wide but our key focus at present is the use of locally grown rape cake pellets as a domestic heating fuel, used in pellet burners which are quickly becoming very popular across europe as the price of gas is set to keep on rising.

Pellet boilers can either replace traditional gas fired central heating boilers or can come in the form of attractive in the room fire places with heating and hot water functions.

There is now a grant scheme in place to cover half the costs of installation of pellet boilers under the low carbon buildings programme.

We hope to help facilitate the use of pellet burners that can burn both wood pellets made from scrap wood and rape cake pellets.

With this in mind we are working with green architects, boiler installers and farmers to help facillitate the move to a sustainable home heating fuel.

Alongside this we have developed our own Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant that runs on waste vegetable oil. We have developed the plant from cheap items from the waste stream and have been using it for three purposes:
  1. To produce heat and power for our workshop and office
  2. To test the fuel characteristics of waste vegetable oil in a test engine
  3. To develop a working prototype for a low cost CHP plant for developing countries.

Our work towards an integrated model of crop growth and fuel usage has been followed up by the BedZED project who are pioneering Zero (carbon) Engergy Developments.

Some of thier latest work includes integrated rape growth and seed pressing for future developments: