Come Cruise with the GA and Seacoast Energy Alternatives

 The first Green Alliance dockside party of the summer will be held tomorrow Wednesday, June 15th! With evidence of partnerships at work, Seacoast Energy Alternatives with the help of the Green Alliance invites past, present and future customers to board the M/V Thomas Laighton for their second annual free harbor cruise. Green Alliance partner Isles of Shoals Steamship Company offered their services to help bring a night of food, music and fun to life.

SEA will also be hosting a pre-cruise dockside party with a cash bar and food from the pellet grill from 5-7pm and the cruise will run from 7-10pm. Participants must be on the dock by 5pm to take part in the harbor cruise, however you may enjoy the dockside party and leave before the cruise departs.

Green Alliance dockside parties will continue throughout the summer with Visions Kitchens and Design dockside party on June 22nd, Waterline Alternative Energy’s on July 20th and many more!

Revision Energy’s Grand Opening Bash in Exeter

Summer is a magical time for solar power enthusiasts. Gone are the 4:00 PM winter sunsets, replaced by longer, warmer days and more sunshine. On June 17, Revision Energy will celebrate Summer Solstice by throwing a Grand Opening Bash at their new solar showroom located at 7 Commercial Drive in Exeter, NH.

“We’ll have local food, drink, music, and fun,” promises Dan Clapp, New Hampshire Branch Manager for the renewable energy company. A blow up bounce house will provide entertainment for the kids while adults enjoy Reedhook beer and local wine. Blue Moon Evolution of Exeter will cater the event, serving up fresh, local and organic fare. ReVision’s own Josh Rollson will delight the crowd with his musical stylings. In his spare time, Rollson works with Guitar Doors, a nonprofit that provides music programming to incarcerated individuals. The fun starts at 4:00 PM, with a lights out time of 9:00 PM.

Clapp has been busy working to get the new location up and running. “A solar hot water crew has been operating out of Exeter since March,” he is happy to report. “We’re in the process of installing solar thermal, photovoltaic, and a pellet boiler to make the shop carbon neutral.”

ReVision Energy has completed more than 2,500 solar installations in Maine and New Hampshire. “Residents are starting to fully grasp that a solar PV or hot water system can not only help them save money over time, but also actually acts as a value-raiser to any commercial or residential property,” according to Clapp.

Forget the campfire – stock up on wood for your winter stove today!

Between the beaches, barbecues and bocce ball, the summer months are also a great for tackling all those long-delayed home improvement projects. It’s a booming time of year for businesses like Middleton Building Supply in Dover, with hacksaws and hoses fly off the shelves as quickly as light bulbs and lacquers.

But if you ask Manager Jim Bruneau which of his store’s products are the biggest summer hit, one of the answers might surprise you.

“We definitely sell a lot of wood pellets and wood bricks for stoves,” says Bruneau. No, he’s not trying to remind me – cruelly – that three straight seasons of winter are right around the corner. And he’s not joking around either.

The first frost might still be months away. But it’s never too early to prepare for the always-brutal New England winters. Particularly with oil – the chief fuel source for upwards of 75% of New England homes – once again being a hot topic and huge question mark for American consumers.

“With the price of oil spiking again, people are always eager to buy the pellets and bricks ahead of time,” says Bruneau. “After oil shot up a little while back, people actually started stocking up even earlier this year.”

Middleton carries both wood pellets and wood bricks. While New England Wood Pellets (out of Jaffrey, New Hampshire) serves as their chief supplier for pellets, they also offer WoodBrick Fuel as a log or brick stove option.

Limelight Deals offers hyperlocal savings

Watch out Portsmouth! There is a new superhero in town with the power to save consumers up to 90% at local businesses. Right now we don’t know much about this new hero, except that he (or she) has a lime for a head.

What we do know is that the enigmatic figure is tied to this week’s launch of Seacoast Media Group’s Limelight Deals, a new variation on Internet deal sites like Groupon and Living Social with a hyperlocal twist.

The premise is simple: sign up online at Limelightdeals.com and receive offers to buy-in to big discounts at local businesses in your email inbox.

The first deal to hit subscribers’ inboxes sold out within just 12 hours. A total of 500 people signed up to pay just $1 for a $7 sandwich at Moe’s Italian Sandwiches.

Another Limelight Deal gave consumers the chance to score year round savings at over 90 local businesses. Close to 20 subscribers took advantage of a $25 one year membership and organic t-shirt deal offered by the Green Alliance, a seacoast wide green business union and consumer co-op. GA members can use their Green Card to access over $1,000 in savings at local businesses.

Celebrate Father's Day at Clay Hill Farm

Looking for something different to do with dad this Father’s Day? Summer Solstice at Clay Hill Farm is a free community event celebrating the great outdoors and honoring fathers, families and Mother Earth. The Sunday, June 19th event will feature local food, music, games, and family fun for all ages from 11 AM-2 PM.

Originally built in 1870 as a working farm, Clay Hill Farm has transformed into a 220-seat restaurant and special occasion venue nestled amidst 11+ acres of rolling lawns, protected woodlands, and colorful gardens. “This summer, we’re going to be showcasing local food by launching a new Made in Maine menu for the summer,” says owner Jennifer McShera. “100% of ingredients and products will be made right here in the Pine Tree State.”

“A lot of people are curious about eating a Maine only food diet these days,” she explains. “We want to bring together themes that are important to individuals and families.

As part of that mission, Clay Hill Farm will showcase Community Supported Agriculture on Father’s Day. Visitors will have the opportunity to support local farms by pre-purchasing shares of local agriculture from Moon Dance Gardens of South Berwick, Spiller Farm of Wells and Touching Earth Farm of Kittery.

Greenovations owner sees products as tools for education

When the business line at Greenovations rings, it’s not always someone inquiring about store hours or driving directions. Just as often, owner Christopher Ring finds himself fielding detailed questions about the products themselves.

What are the manufacturer’s credentials? How does it work? Where was it made?

“I learned pretty quickly that this wasn’t just a retail business – it’s an educational business,” says Ring, who opened his sustainability-focused home retail store a year ago this May. “The questions people call in with, they’d never ask of the bigger stores selling a similar product. So I think they have higher expectations when they deal with us.”

A catch-all building and remodeling depot, Greenovations offers everything from super efficient wall radiators to insulation, floors to countertops, cabinets to wood stoves, paints and coatings to solar tubes, attic fans, plywood and tiles, and accessories for just about every room in the house.

For Ring, all of them have a unique story to tell – whether it’s the butcher block made of wood dating back to the days of Christopher Columbus, or the efforts of Eco Timber Flooring to invest in sound forestry practices at their Bolivian farm, virtually giving away their operations to one-time “poachers” who then transformed the operation into a sustainable one.

“So their profit motive was actually outweighed by their ecological motive,” says Ring, expounding on the story of Eco Timber. “It’s things like that that make me feel better about companies, because it shows they’re willing to make the serious decisions about who they are as a company.”

Portsmouth engineer blazes trail for women, green design

She may have been the first woman engineer he’d ever hired, but James Petersen also saw in Sarah Carter a unique narrative thread that seemed to bind all of his standout acquisitions: the itch to come home.

“We’ve gotten our best employees the same way we got Sarah, which is to say she spent a good part of her twenties working for a large firm in a big city,” says Petersen, owner of the Portsmouth-based Petersen Engineering. “By the time Sarah got here, she’d had five years of solid fundamentals under her belt, so I felt like the beneficiary of her missing the culture of home.”

Like many college grads, Sarah Carter needed some time to enjoy her 20s. After graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Vermont in 2003, she moved west to the mountains of Colorado. There the Maine native spent the next year working primarily at a ski resort, giving youth lessons and punching lift tickets, all the while enjoying the high, pressure-free air of the Rockies.

But it wasn’t long before Carter felt drawn back to a world at once more grounded and sky-bound: mechanical engineering. Leaving the high altitude and soft powder behind, Carter moved east to Washington D.C., where she landed at a job as an engineer at a large, high-profile firm. And while the work was rewarding – most of her projects involved large government buildings, both in and around the Beltway and throughout the country – after five years, Carter and her husband found themselves missing the comparatively laid-back New England.