it would be a great opportunity to show you what i do with the solar bus here we have our solar powered water fountain the simplest type of solar energy system because there's no batteries or anything whenever the sun shines on the solar panel that it powers this  little pump down there it's actually just a built pump that's commonly used for boats and it's really sensitive right now because the sun is behind some trees and i really have to hold the panel a pie this is our solar oven one of our favorite  that at the angle it should be so you can imagine how quickly and how hot it gets on a nice sunny day and we but i've baked everything everything you can imagine in here from baked potatoes to bread to you know a big pot of stew frozen pizza kids love this one it's a solar powered model train and again it's very simple it's a solar direct system and there's no batteries or anything we have a solar panel directly connected to a com available model train set and instead of plugging into the wall usually there's a transformer that changes the energy from the power company to what the train set wants but this particular one works really well just directly i just i turn it away slows down and it will even stop if i turn it completely away and it's very simple system i'm going to take the same solar panel right now and just disconnect it from thomas there and i've got a little radio i'm just connected in there where the batteries normally are but instead we have a solar panel here we've got ac d c going right now not really my favorite band but to each his own i guess you can hear it just another way people can learn and see because you know i find that they don't really teach this kind of stuff in schools and people have a lot of misconceptions and they think that you know we're waiting for solar and also get more efficient and things like that but when they when they see that the fountain in the train set in the radio and everything they realized hey these the solar panels actually work pretty good right now this is the solar bus itself had it since two thousand and three and it just grew out of my passion to show people and educate the public about the uses of solar energy for large solar panels on the roof and each one of those solar panels produces about ninety watts of energy when the sun is shining full i've figured out that i can power a moderate sized concert for about twelve hours straight just in these batteries without any energy coming in from the sun and these batteries that we use on the bus are six volt batteries and they're also the type of batteries  they are called golf cart batteries because they're typically used in electric golf carts and they work really well with solar energy systems too because they can take a what they call a deep cycle meaning you can take out up to eighty percent of the energy that they store on a regular basis and cycle it that far down a lot and it doesn't shorten their lifetime we can run twelve volt appliances like people have cigarette lighter plugs in their car and they charge of their cellphones the inverter takes the energy from the batteries and it converts it into a regular hundred twenty volt ac power so we can plug in stage speakers and amplifiers and all kind of our movie projectors or whatever it is and there the other things we have here are just basically monitoring equipment so we can see how much energy is left in the batteries we can see how much energy is coming in from the panels make sure everything is working what that does is it prevents us from overcharging the batteries because if the batteries are full and the sun is still shining and the panels kept trying to put more more energy into the batteries it would actually damage them other than that we just have a lot of room for people to sit down enjoy themselves and sometimes we have a whole big crew of people coming to help set up for big events and other times it's just me so right now we just have a light bulb plugged in there we don't have any vacuum cleaners or big energy hog spied if there's any doubters out there  l just turn it on just to prove to you that solar energy really works it's a lot of fun going on road trips it's especially want to run on vegetable oil and this is a big bus burns a lot of fuel would be kind of hypocritical if i was driving around to events and you know burning gasoline two or three restaurants in the burlington area are nice enough to give me their waste use about small oil after that i have to filter it because it was big there's chunks of french fries in there and things like that what i have here is a fifty gallon barrel where i just cut two holes in the top and i have these sock filters and comstock filters in there so i can pour the dirty oil into the filter and then it goes through the filter in it inside of five years fifty gallons of clean vegetable oil there's this electrical heater band heater down there that i can turn on in really cold weather and it heats up the vegetable oil and allows the filtering process to happen a lot faster and i have to turn it on when it's really cold out otherwise i wouldn't be able to even pump the fuel out and that's what this is just a hand crank pump drive my car the bus up and put this right into the tank i get approximately the same mileage that i do with regular diesels actually rudolf diesel back in one thousand nine hundred three when he demonstrated at the world's fair he had running on peanut oil one of my neighbors just gave me a bunch of their best boil i think it was from last thanksgiving when they were cooking a turkey or something like that there's a tire place i take the bus when i write i need a new tire and the guy says he doesn't like working on my bus because it makes him hungry when i drive in there the idea is we have to add a second tank because we have to start up the engine on something other than vegetable oil and once the engine is hot then we can flip it over to the winds right here coming off the radiator we just basically add an extra loop on to the radiator of hot water and this hot water is being pumped over to the vegetable oil tank and it heats up the best with oil and then once the bus boils heated up enough i flip a switch up on the dashboard and then we run on vegetable oil and right here you can see this is the vets will filter right here this is the the fill the oil coming in goes through this filter and then right up here is the valve where i can actually switches between the oil and the main fuel tank which as often as possible we have filled with biodiesel and then this thing makes it so the oil that's coming through here is actually going to the motor and this is right here the main fuel line see there's two going in this is the main tank this is the vets will oil tank and this is the one coming out of this valve and this goes right into the motor and that's it sometimes we run boil and occasionally we try to do it as little as possible we have to run on a little bit of diesel so whatever we happen to be running on at the particular time we put the appropriate bumper sticker on there it's really just kind of like a hobby of mine technically i did have to you know register it as a business because when i go to an event sometimes i sell just you know bumper stickers and i have solar bus t shirts and i try to recoup some of the the cost it actually cost a lot of money to keep this bus rolling like i had to buy a new tire for the front of this last year in a one tires alone is three hundred fifty dollars so it's not a non profit but  t i say it's a no profit because i don't make any money off of it i just try to break even and over the years i've finally gotten to the point where i pretty much do break even but i do have plans to take it to the next level and i'm actually in the process of filling out all the paperwork to become a nonprofit and i have a board of directors of people that are really interested in helping bring this thing to the next level and what that involves is what we're calling it is going beyond the bus because while the bus itself is when it's on wheels it makes it very very flexible for us to take to places but it's also a little confining because there's only one bus so we want to set up like educational displays and permanent places like we're actually already started working on a project to put solar panels on the roof of the band shell and battery park in burlington so that every concert that's there the whole summer