Our Projects

Farkha Eco-Village Biogas Workshop

Farkha Ecovillage Rooftop Solar CITIES biogas build

January 12, 2016

In Farkha Ecovillage in the West Bank, Mercy College Envisaj Club students worked with the local villagers on the construction of the second passive solar heated Solar CITIES 3 IBC biodigester. Farkha Ecovillage had been the site of this year’s Ecovillage Design Education workshop (EDE) in cooperation with the Tamera Global Campus and the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). For this project, we choose a roof space behind the solar hot water system, one building over from the kitchen.

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Passive Solar Heated IBC Biodigester at Auja Ecovillage

The Solar CITIES solar heated IBC biodigester in Auja Bedouin Village in Palestine

January 10, 2016

This was the first field deployment of our new “refugee camp” biogas system made from 3 IBCs with a passive solar heating window on the south side. We did field trials at Tamera Ecovillage in Portugal, Kathy Puffer’s homestead in Tilson, NY, and at Janice Kelsey’s homestead in Glenmoore, Pennsylvania.

In addition to building the Solar CITIES 3 IBC Biodigester at the bedouin camp with students from Mercy College’s “Envisaj Mercy Environmental Sustainability and Justice League” Club, we installed two Israeli HomeBiogas systems in a Bedouin Village. We also at stayed at the Auja Eco-Center where HomeBiogas had built two larger, four cubic meter systems to handle restaurant waste.

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Refugee Camp Passive Solar Biogas System

Refugee camp digester being field tested at the Kelsey household in Glenmoore, PA

October 31, 2015

In 2016, Solar CITIES will be moving rapidly toward providing biogas systems for refugee camps and orphanages to respond to the crises of displaced persons exacerbated in extremis by the armed conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine and other parts of the MENA region.

While biogas systems are now becoming well known as sanitation solutions as well as renewable energy solutions, very little attention has been paid to household and community systems for impoverished or crisis areas. In these areas there is a need for systems that are extremely quick and easy to set up, are low cost, and can be easily replicated by stakeholders through participatory community-based development. There has been little attention paid to systems that run on organic residuals (food wastes and toilet wastes) created by congested human populations which are all too often a source of noxious pollutants, diseases and dangerous vermin. In addition, there has been even less attention paid to the creation and deployment of small-scale biodigester systems that can work well year-round in areas where cold weather is of particular concern.

Solar CITIES has taken on the challenge of responding to this dilemma by creating our Solar CITIES 3 IBC Refugee Camp Passive Solar Biodigesters. The first experiments for this system were conducted in Tamera Solar Test field in Portugal during the summer of 2015 by T.H. Culhane, Martin Funk, Stefanie Thieme and Nick Chase. A prototype field system was then built in Greece at Skala Ecovillage by Martin Funk and Sandra Imhof.
Upon return to the US, the Solar CITIES team and Envisaj (Mercy College Environmental Sustainability and Justice League) built two insulated passive solar-heated IBC digesters at the home of Kathy Puffer and at the Yonkers Groundwork Hudson Community Garden.

At the Kelsey homestead in Pennsylvania, site of the first Backyard IBC digester in the US, Envisaj students, Culhane, and the Solar CITIES team put all the pieces together for the first time: A soy polyurethane foam insulated Solar CITIES IBC digester with two double pane windows for passive solar heating (one facing south, one facing west, with mirror reflection of the southern sunlight on the west facing window) and the floating IBC gas holder, filled with antifreeze for winter performance.

We are logging temperature performance with our Arduino microcontroller based ds18b20 temperature probes. All indications are that this system is ideal for getting out into the field because it is quick to build within a few hours and they can work year-round.

Please… DO try this at home and get the word out to refugee camps everywhere!

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Passive Solar Heated and Insulated IBC Biodigester

Passive Solar Heated Solar CITIES IBC tank biodigester: A window into a new world.

September 26, 2015

Inspired by the promising data from our experiments at Tamera Solar Test Field, we decided to take one of our soy-based polyurethane foam-insulated biodigesters up to Kathy Puffer’s Homestead Ecosystem in Tillson, NY. We cut out the foam on the south facing side, painted the IBCs exposed wall black, and installed foam in a double pane glass window. At Tamera, we installed a black IBC insulated on three sides and covered with two layers of clear stretch wrap plastic on the south and west sides.

Preliminary results show favorable solar gain on sunny days, keeping the digester in Tillson at or near 25 degrees Celsius, even when ambient drops to three Celsius at night.

There are still thermal losses at night through the window, which we cover with a blanket. There is also loss through the top of the digester where it is uncovered because of the lid and the feeding pipes. It may not stay active all winter, particularly during cloudy times, but it certainly helps in sunny times and will definitely boost production in fall and spring even if it slows dramatically during the winter. We suggest this now as a standard feature in IBC builds. The marginal cost of an old double pane window (which we got used) is negligible compared to the gains.

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Global Ecovillage Network’s First Puxin Biodigester

Suderbyne Ecovillage creates Europe’s first Solar CITIES Puxin Digestor

August 24, 2015

In April of 2015, T.H. Culhane of Solar CITIES travelled to Tamera Eco-village in Portugal. Culhane had personally bought and shipped Puxin molds there as a gift to the Global Ecovillage Network in honor of fallen comrade Paulo Mellett. Culhane had announced his intention to make the Puxin molds available to all GEN members at the GEN 19 conference at Zegg Ecovillage in Germany. He followed up on the promise at Paulo’s memorial service at Monkym Wyld Eco-village near Dorset England at the end of the summer of 2014.

At Tamera, Culhane led a workshop in biogas designs that included a dry build of the Puxin system. GEN Director Robert Hall from Suderbyne Ecovillage in Sweden was among the workshop participants being trained. He agreed that since his Ecovillage, on the island of Gotland, was already using commercial biogas for almost all of its gas needs, it would be the ideal place to showcase the technology. It is also a great place to work on the necessary “code compliance creep” wherein we use small scale demonstrations to eventually get policy to encourage this technology.

Paulo Mellett’s wife Ruth Andrade, working with Lush Cosmetics, secured funding from Lush to ship the Solar CITIES molds from Portugal to Sweden where Robert picked them up.

Robert Hall and Alisa Dendro and others from the ecovillage finished Europe’s first Puxin community-scale digester by August of 2015, placing it inside their super cool geodesic dome greenhouse where the fertilizer it produces can help create a year round cornucopia.

You can find out more at their website.

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“Stretcho” Biodigester at Tamera Solar Village

August 20, 2015

“Stretcho” is an IBC tank system that was built during the Solar CITIES Biogas Workshop at Tamera in April 2015. As part of the Experimental Week that took place in August 2015, the IBC tank was wrapped with two layers of stretch foil with an airspace in between to increase internal temperatures of the tank. The results are amazing! Two layers of stretch wrap increase the temperatures significantly and decrease internal temperature fluctuations caused by the daily high and low ambient temperatures.