The Greening of Gavin

New eBookstore and Aussie Hosting

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Hands up those of you who knew I wrote sustainable living eBooks?  Not many I reckon, and I believe I know why.

Because it wasn’t very visible on the blog or the web for that matter.  It wasn’t search friendly or easy to find via google either.

sustainable living ebooksWell to fix that, I created a subdomain of this blog called shop.greeningofgavin.com, that looks pretty much the same as this blog except that it is cut down a bit to improve e-commerce functionality.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been busy in the back-end tweaking (not twerking) the site to improve the look and feel and to list the eBooks that I’ve written over the last three years.  The new Shop @ Greening of Gavin is powered by Woocommerce if anyone is interested, which I am now quite proficient in due to working daily on our workshop store.

I have also been researching other environmentally friendly products that I use to see if I can source and ship them potential customers.  I will see how it pans out, but for now you can buy and download the sustainable living eBooks.

Also in the last week I moved all my hosting back to Australia (was in Salt Lake City, Utah) due to a massive DDOS attack that company was having for over 3 weeks.  It was also the main reason I haven’t written much because the site was very unstable and it was difficult to gain admin access or even take a backup.

So now my blog is located in a Data Centre here in Melbourne, Australia, hosted by VentraIP.  We have had a good experience carbon-offset-website-ventraIP-on-darkwith this IT service with Little Green Workshops for over a year, with about 2 minutes downtime which I think is acceptable.  This is one of the reasons I moved hosts (as well as the DDOS attack).

Another reason was that I could offset my carbon emissions for the electricity consumed by the servers in the Data Centre.  I paid for certified carbon offsets for this blog, Shop @ Greening of Gavin and Little Green Cheese which makes me feel a lot better.  Even though all the power I consume here at home is either Solar or GreenPower which powers all my IT infrastructure here, my old hosting was not so green.  Now it is!

So it’s been all fun and games here on the blog and not a heck of writing getting done.  Now that I have a stable blog, the words will begin to flow.  I’m even thinking about writing a few more eBooks and finish off that gardening one I’ve been threatening to torture you with 😉

Current ideas are simple irrigation and water harvesting, gardening, a second cheese making book volume, composting and worm farming to name a few.

To help get the creative juices flowing, what topics would you like to see me cover in the next series of books.  Let me know via comment and I will add them to my brainstorming list!  Any ideas graciously accepted.

So until I get some more words on the page, checkout my new eBookstore to see what topics I’ve already written about.

The Great Kilowatt Challenge eBook – On Sale!

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A year in the writing, The Great Kilowatt Challenge eBook and companion worksheet are now available for purchase at my eBookstore!

Here is the book blurb;

The Great Kilowatt Challenge

The Great Kilowatt Challenge eBook

The Step by Step Guide to $aving Easy Money off Your Power Bills

Want to save some easy money off your power bill, but you don’t know where to start?

Are you sick of paying a small fortune on seemingly ever rising  electricity costs?

Do you want to take back control?

Well you can right now!  The Great Kilowatt Challenge is an eBook and worksheet designed to help you get control of your electricity consumption and lower that bill.

The step by step four week challenge will help you gain a better understanding of how to determine which appliances and behaviours within your home are costing you the most money, and how to turn that around back in your favour.

The companion worksheet is available as downloadable content within the ebook.

This comprehensive eBook is exclusive to The Greening of Gavin readers only.  You will not find this excellent guide anywhere else on the web or at other ebook retailers until a few months time.

Get it before you receive your next electricity bill.  You won’t regret it!

For more information about what the ebook offers, head on over to ebookstore.

 

A big shout out goes to Pam for proof reading it, and to all the beta testers who participated in the very first Great Kilowatt Challenge in 2011.

From that original and successful series of blog posts came the idea for the eBook where it saved many readers a lot of money off their power bills.

The worksheet, which is found as a link within the eBook, has full instructions for entering your meter data, and assists in automatically calculating your daily electricity usage and cost.  It couldn’t be any easier than that.

I have also included a weekly feedback option within the eBook where the challenge participants can share their results and ask further questions if needs be.  I don’t expect that everyone will share, but the option is there if you want it.

Anyway, thanks for being patient with me while I put this eBook together.  It is well worth the wait!

Next eBook At Proof Readers!

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I know that I have been hinting occasionally that I am in the process of writing two new eBooks, and that it has been over 18 months since my last publication.  Thankfully, I knuckled down for the entire weekend and managed to get one finished!

The Great Kilowatt Challenge is now with my proof reader, the lovely Pam (my mother in law), and should be ready for publication in the next week.

It is a guide with workbooks that will help you reduce your power bills and collect easy money by simple behavioural changes during a four-week challenge.  I have personally done the challenge twice and saved 62.2% and 10% respectively of my power bill.  All through energy efficiency alone.

Add solar PV to the mix and the savings have been amazing.

The eBook was in a half written state for about six months, and I finally found a free weekend in which to complete it.  At over 11,000 words, it is just the right size for this type of guide/workbook.

The cover I created is shown below.

The Great Kilowatt Challenge (c)

The Great Kilowatt Challenge © Gavin Webber

It has felt great to be back in the writer’s seat again, banging on the keyboard hour after hour.

So, stay tuned for the book launch sometime during the week.

I am excited!  I know that I had lots of interested readers when I first announced this project a while back, so it should get the message out that saving money on your power bills is easy money!