Since the release of electric patio heaters, some people have always been against their use. The biggest arguement is that they are bad for the environment because of the way the heat is generated. Other popular complaints are that they waste hear and as a whole they waste lots of energy.

The biggest complaint, that they damage the environment, is actually true. The way a normal patio heater generates heat is by burning gas. Because the gas is burned, as with everything that burns, carbon dioxide is created which causes damage to the environment.

The second argument against them, that they waste a huge amount of heat, is also true. Despite the tops of patio heaters being designed to reflect heat so it goes towards the ground, a large amount of heat is still wasted.

However, a new heating company called Chillchaser has created a range of new patio heaters that are aimed to resolve all those issues.

Instead of buring gas to generate heat, Chillchaser use a new method of creating warmth. They use carbon fibre rods to create the heat. The main advantage of using this form of heating is that no CO2 is created in the process. You might think that this means it has no effect on the environment, however, it doesn’t quite. Because these heaters don’t use gas, they require electricity to power the carbon rods, however, the actual eneregy required is very little so they actually only release 50% of the emissions that a standard patio heater would.

This new heating method also combat the second biggest complaint that they waste alot of heat. Carbon fibre heating is able to create more focused heat which means that less heat is actually wasted.

The last advantage that Chillchaser patio heaters have is that they are built with an infrared sensor. The sensor is able to detect movement around it and turn the heater off when no movement is detected. This new feature means that the heater won’t be left on when it’s not in use, meaning less damage to the environment is caused.

By the looks of it, it seems that Chillchaser has revolutionized the patio heater and many eco-warriors won’t be able to complain about this heater. I guess the only complaint that Chillchaser can’t resolve is that patio heaters shouldn’t be used in the first place.

I would love to see how Chillchaser would improve a standarddehumidifiers; maybe build in a weather stations to it, that would solve two problems in one.

One of my first herb gardens was in the middle of a clay field and it was not a cinch to get plants to grow right. When you’re planning your garden, you’ve got to put sunlight and earth quality at the top of the list of things to consider. You need the right balance of both as well as the necessary water. If you can get 2 or 3 of these factors right, you are all set.

To solve my clay earth problems, I turned to rock gardening, which focuses on adding lots of rocks to your landscape and focusing on herbs that only need a few inches of good earth.

If you’ve got a similar situation, you can grow your own rock garden. Some herb plants truly love the rocky craggy dirt that you have in areas like this all over the world. With excellent drainage, adequate sunshine and all the nooks and crannies around the rocks where roots can dig in, rock gardens may be just the thing for you to experiment with.

When planning your herb garden, be sure that you are choosing plants that can stay compact, because with limited space you do not want anything taking over. Look at your reference books for the right herbs for rock gardens. Good ones are those that have silver or gray leaves. This is a big tip-off that these herbs can do well in this environment.

• Hen-and-Chicks: {I cannot imagine cutting open a hen or chick and rubbing it on a wart, but this perennial succulent herb, which is also known as St. Patrick’s cabbage, has a long history of doing just that.} The leaves of this herb store water for periods of drought. Your hen can get up to four inches across pretty fast. Soon little off-shoots, or chicks, will sprout up from the edges of your hen. In the summer, a 9 inch spike arises from the center of each mature hen to show pinkish-red blooms. Before you know it, you will have a colony of plants.

• Wild Oregano: This perennial from the Mediterranean region can grow energetically up to 30 inches tall with its oval leaves and purple flowers that come out late in the summer. This isn’t the same kind of oregano that you find in Italian meals, but you can eat it.

• Marjoram: It’s fabulous when you can sculpt a beautiful rock garden using culinary herbs like Marjoram. It’s a perennial that has a sweet scent with oval gray-green leaves and tiny white blossoms. For marjoram to retain its shape and form, keep it clipped back (use the clippings in your Italian dishes) so that it will keep growing well—full sun and the good drainage in your rock garden will help too.

• Thyme: Because there are so many varieties of thyme, you will want to be sure you’re getting the correct type for your rock garden—below a foot tall. Try those with shiny, little leaves that are huddled along the woody stems. As an added benefit, these usually have white or pink flowers. Thyme grows best when the earth is sandy, well-drained and gets a whole lot of sun. You’ll want to keep this herb trimmed back to maintain its shape and to help it remain hearty.

The contrast between the rocks and the herbs can dazzle the eyes, without losing any of the other sensations, including smell and taste.

Good luck with your herb gardening. Be sure to let me know how your herb garden grows.

Here is more information on Herb Garden Designs. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Herb Gardens.

Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32, 2006) calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in California to 1990 levels by 2020. All we have to do to fix the problem is to determine emissions goals for cars and light-duty trucks and give the automaker their marching orders, right? Well, no. There’s a much better solution.
If we continue to assume that people will keep driving cars, and that the population is expected to increase, the carmakers alone are not going to be able to solve the problem.

What about changing the existing assumptions? What if people didn’t have to drive as far? What if they more of them took public transportation? Could thinking like that, combined with lower emissions from the biggest polluters, enable us to reduce greenhouse gasses (ghg’s) in spite of an increase in population?

Enter Senate Bill 375 (SB 375, 2008), which requires a reduction of ghg’s to 1990 levels from new land development or redevelopment projects. It also called for the creation of a technical advisory committee to advise the California Air Resource Board (CARB) on how to reach the 2020 goal.

So where does this committee come from? Who has the skill and knowledge to put together such a long-reaching plan? Twenty-one people have volunteered their time to make this happen. For the most part, they fall into two groups: organizations who want their cities and counties to thrive and organizations whose goal is to reduce emissions. While these goals may seem to be at odds, the job of the Regional Targets Advisory Committee (RTAC) is to make a plan to do both at the same time.

Who are the representatives of California residents and businesses? Ten committee members are involved in local government and city planning, five are involved in public transportation, five are from organizations that support environmental issues, and one from a California new home builder. They come from all of the major metropolitan areas as well as universities and state-wide organizations.
The RTAC report to the California Air Resources Board is due at the end of September. In the next two months, they will put together recommendations of actions and measurements that will enable each region to meet the required goals, taking into consideration the capabilities of each entity and current and projected economic factors. No small feat.

In the end, their accomplishment will be one that could not have happened without such a multi-discipline long-term commitment. Only an effort like this has the potential to significantly impact the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in California.

Palm Springs Car Dealers, Palm Springs New Cars, Orange County Cadillac

The basic POS systems you may see on a typical retail establishment consists of a cash register with or without a built in cash drawer, monitor, receipt printers, and an input device. It can also be a touch screen monitors, programmable keyboards, or scanners and handheld devices for inputting data into the POS system.

Touch screen technology: Many restaurants find touch screen monitors as more intuitive to use than keyboards, as it can reduce mistypes and can easily cancel orders in milliseconds, and because it provides flexible user interfaces and programming. Touch screens also uses less electricity and much easier to position on the counter table, but they are more prone to breakdowns.

Handheld devices: Restaurant POS equipment like PDAs, which are commonly wireless devices that transmits data back to its base station and into the POS system. You can also use the newer version, which is the write-on handhelds that allows you to write detail such as the orders and sends them directly to the kitchen! These types of handheld devices are perfect for your staff who interacts with your customers, when up-selling desserts and drinks roaming around table per table.

Keyboards: You’ll find that most grocery and convenient stores prefer to use this type of POS hardware because it allows them to program individual keys for specific item codes and prices. A standard keyboard consists of 101-key, like with any computer. Other have built-in magnetic stripe readers for processing credit cards, others are small and flat, like what we usually see in fast food outlets.

Scanners: This restaurant hardware reads bar codes and converts it before inputting it’s data to the POS computer. Generally, it speeds up a sales transaction as well as accurately inputs product or service payment of a customer. POS scanners are connected through Y-connectors called wedges which makes them function as an extension of your keyboard.

Volume of customers: For different volume of customers, using different types of scanners can be very helpful. If the counter line has several customers, your staff can easily use a CCD scanner or entry-level laser scanner. But if your counter line is loaded with customers, then an autosensing laser scanners would be better. This type of scanner turns on when an item is placed in front of it, scans its code, and then turn off again. But if the counter line is overflowing with customers, then you’re staff could really use some help of the omnidirectional scanner, where it can scan a bar code from any angle with its 15 or 20 lasers simultaneously!

Additional Restaurant POS hardware to consider

Cash drawers: Where you store cash, credit card slips, gift certificates, and other imporatant things. When looking to buy for a POS cash register, look for sturdy construction of at least 18-gauge steel. And since the usable life of a cash drawer is measured, make sure you can replace rollers, bearings, and other parts, because most cash drawers opens when a signal is released from the receipt printer.

Point of Sale printers: Every retail business owner has them, every POS system needs one of course! A POS printer is needed in order to print a receipt and create credit card slips. The dot matrix printers, also known as impact printers, are inexpensive and uses ink ribbon to print on regular paper. While thermal printers use heat and special heat-sensitive paper to generate receipts. It is slightly expensive than a dot matrix printer because it’s faster and quieter when printing receipts. They are also more reliable because they have less moving parts.

Customer displays: Also called the pole display. This restaurant hardware lets your customer view their item and its price, and can be used to support advertising. Before buying a customer display, make sure that you check for the right height and width, which will perfectly fit your counter table, and its compatibility with your POS software.

Check readers: If you’re still thinking if you’re going to buy one, now would be the best time to say yes! This little device can help prevent fraud by verifying essential account information on cheks that are presented by your customers. It can save you money and eliminate flushing money down the drain because of fraud.

Magnetic stripe readers: This piece of restaurant hardware is used to read credit cards. You can also purchase keyboards and touch screens has a built-in magnetic strip readers for convenience.

Fingerprint readers: If you want to limit which POS terminal can a staff use, then this type of restaurant hardware can be handy. You can also use this for employee logins thus preventing any of your employees from logging in for somebody as a favor.

Always rememeber when purchasing a restaurant POS system, hardawre or software, you have to make sure that you review their details first. It doesn’t matter how expensive or cheap a POS equipment is, always consider the environment where you’re going to use it. Regular cleaning can help keep your POS terminal in tip top shape, vacuuming dust and lubing your receipt printer can extend its usable life and maintaining an over all clean workstation can help protect your POS computers from annoying dust and spills. You can always request for a FREE POS system quote online where local suppliers will offer you competitive price lists of any restaurant hardware and software you need based on the the information you provide them. So you would never have to waste money buying the wrong POS systems.

For more information on restaurant POS systems or to have a local POS professional serving the restaurant industry in your location see more information at POS-For-Restaurants.com.

Scented candles increase the ambience of any room in your home. If you are a romantic kind of person, you’ll appreciate the aroma of these scented wax masterpieces. Your guests will be intoxicated with calm and well being. As you will appreciate, the flickering glow of any candle heightens the elegance of a room.

Even before it is lit, the subtle fragrance of a scented candle will heighten your energy level,. So when you come home worse for wear, the glow and aroma of a scented candle tends to unwind you & elevate your level of energy.

Aromatic candles serve as wonderful gifts for all occasions and every season, and they are particularily meaningful when crafted by your own hands.

1. Choose Your Candle Fragrance]

Fragrance oil is available in most craft shops. You may also shop for it on the web. I would suggest that you opt for fragrance oils rather than going for cheap water or alcohol based fragrances. Because your wax mix is oil based, your fragrance must also be oil based. Why? Well, as oil and water do not blend, the water from a water based perfume tends not to mix with the melted wax.

2. Choose Your Wax

The basics of {making a scented candle} are more or less the same as for ordinary wax candles. Start by selecting your wax. Available in the market is a versatile range of wax beginning with naturals from beeswax, palm or soy and moving along to paraffin or gel wax. You’ll want to decide on the aromatic intensity for your candles before choosing your wax. For example, in case of gel candles, gel wax with less density holds less fragrance compared to gel wax with higher density.

3. The Process of Making Scented Candles

Now that we’ve covered wax selection, let’s talk about the process of creating scented candles.

The first task is to melt your wax. I recommend using a double boiler. That means put the wax in a small pot. Now place that container into a slightly larger pot partially filled with water. You may now heat the water. Use a thermometer so as not to burn the wax. The temperature should be kept at 170-180 degrees Fahrenheit.

After the wax is melted, insert a wick into the mold and remove your wax from it’s source of heat. Next add your fragrance oil. One ounce fragrance oil to 1 pound wax will create a 6% fragrance. Appreciate that larger portions of fragrance oil means the candle to burn out sooner.

Now pour your melted wax/fragrance mix into it’s mold. The only task left is to let it the mold cool before removing your candle.

Congratulations on a job well done!

4. Experiment as You Go Along

You will develop expertise in all aspects of the candle craft when you start experimenting. By using different fragrances and colors, you will perfect the candle making technique and thoroughly enjoy the process.

It’s a great feeling to award your friends with a {homemade scented candle} knowing that they will find the fragrant essences both relaxing and invigorating.