There is simply no limit, other than your imagination, when it comes to reusing and recycling items from around your home or the treasures that can be found in junk yards, secondhand stores, garage sales or regretfully less and less these days, the local tip. Mechanarchy finds creative solutions to everyday problems by turning unwanted items into highly useful ones, and all at a mere fraction of both the environmental and financial cost of purchasing them new. If you have old items lying around the home cluttering up your shed or backyard, have a chat to us, we may just be able to come up with a use for them that will help you in other ways. Here are some examples (more to come shortly):

Old bicycle frames are extremely versatile, easy to work with, strong and yet lightweight. We cut this triangular section of frame down from a disused ladies bike. It's bolted to a moveable Solar Panel, which can be taken indoors on cloudy or windy days. The old bicycle seat post fits into a tube bolted to the fence post, enabling the solar panel to be rotated to follow the Sun as it travels across the Sky.

A Solar Hot Water heater originally made from old copper pipe and a disused shop sign for the enclosure, is currently being refurbished. Projects like this one can take some time to complete, it needs a cover and finding a piece of secondhand glass or perspex the right size is not always easy. Patience is a virtue however as these units are extremely efficient and can provide hot water even on cloudy days.

So just where do you place a Solar Hot Water Heater? Why on a disused Volkswagon Kombi Roof Rack of course! This ones bolted to a retaining wall and is raised to the correct Sun angle at the rear by four old star pickets cemented into the ground. The excavations are in readiness for the lagged hot and cold water piping. This set up is perfect for providing a shed with hot water, but what do you do in mid winter when there are days and days of no sunshine?

Why you pick up one of these for $20 at a garage sale. This piece of equipment, currently disassembled for refurbishment, is what's known as a copper hot water heater. It has an inbuilt furnace for wood burning and will heat 120 liters of water in about 45 minutes. It's also insulated, meaning that it will retain its heat for up to 48 Hours.

This unit was built in 1976 and was in pretty poor shape when we found it. The ash box was rusted out and the insulation had caught fire at some stage. We re-built the ash box out of an old heavy guage tool box lid and some scrap 'c' section steel. The copper tank was pressure tested and found to be as good as new.

When connected with the Solar Hot Water Heater, this unit will heat water even faster and makes the ideal storage tank in Summer when the wood furnace doesn't need to be used.

If you live in an area with wind gusts of more than 6 Km/H average per year, a wind generator could be just what you need. This is an old Fisher & Paykel washing machine motor that is awaiting its new life sitting atop a mast, whirling around behind propellor blades, churning out enough electricity to recharge a bank of deep cycle batteries.

These old motors are in high demand however which is why Mechanarchy is working hard to establish a relationship with a washing machine repair business!

This, is an experiment!

An old style ice box refrigerator that was previously being used in a hairdressing salon as a 'trendy' storage cupboard, is being refurbished to its former glory and returned to its original use.

With a twist!

The enclosure that surrounds it has been fully insulated. The floor underneath the fridge is vented, allowing Cool, under floor air to circulate around it. As this air heats, it naturally rises and this hot air is vented out through the roof.

There is nothing new in those ideas. The experiment kicks in when you look at using new technology along with the old. Peltier devices are state of art heat pumps that unlike their refrigerant gas counterparts, don't require environmentally unfriendly gasses, nor large amounts of 240 volt power to run.

Mechanarchy is currently investigating the use of a Peltier device in this ice box fridge, one that not only cools, but also heats water at the same time.

Stay tuned!