We have spent the last week working on a dollhouse sized castle that is powered by clean and renewable energy. We had to learn how to use different types of energy sources to power lights and fans as well as work out a way to pump water in. Below is a video and explanation from Luna of our castle.
Luna: The wiring to the battery is powering the light that's in the fireplace and then there's the light ball lighting up the TV that is powered by the lemon batteries.
Jodi: How are the lemon batteries made:
Luna: ...with the nails and the wires and the pennies.
Jodi: The pennies create a chemical reaction causing a positive charge and the nails a negative charge. The acid of the lemon makes the lemon into battery that can power that little light. It took three lemons to create enough power for the light.
Luna: The wind turbine is powering the fan (we used an electric fan to mimic the wind since we were inside) and then there is that chandelier that's powered by solar panels with a lot of mixed up wires.
Jodi: Yes, so tell me why we put plants on top of the Castle?
Luna: It creates a garden and insulation.
Jodi: This next part is not my best filming... here we go... you can see that we have made a rain water capturing system with small pumps that can fill the bathtub and down below that's the kitchen sink. Again, my filming is not spectacular! What did we use for the pumps for our water system?
Luna: We used the pumps from hand soap to pump water out, it's just a very basic pump, but this shows that you can use clean renewable energy.
Jodi: Which of the sources was the most reliable and always worked regardless of if the wind or weather?
Luna: Solar always worked when the sun was out, and you can actually capture and save solar energy into a battery.
Jodi: But what always worked?
Luna: Batteries. So batteries can be used as a back up to solar and wind energy. They're cleaner than oil and gas, but they're not renewable. They're good step forward and I think this castle shows how we can be moving towards clean energy.