United States

Basement Biodigester in West Virginia

This beautiful wood paneled dragon, the fourth basement biodigester we know of in the world, is in West Virginia

February 20, 2016

Solar CITIES ventures deeper into the sustainable tourism industry with this signature biodigester at the Lone Oak Lodge in West Virginia, and ecotourism destination run by and built with Brock Smith.

Brock writes that this sustainable tourism initiative, which has home biogas at its center, “is dedicated to pointing West Virginia in a new direction for economic development and a better quality of life for the state we love and the people we love!”

West Virginia’s Basement Biodigester on the New River in Prince is the fourth one that Solar CITIES has built. We don’t know if there are any others in the world, but each time we build one we get more and more confident that these “domestic dragons” belong in the house with us, like house pets, rather than banished to the “dog house” outdoors. We already expend a lot of money and energy insulating and heating our homes and since biodigesters need to be kept warm (being animals, after all, rather than machines!) it makes sense to “do this at home, in the home”.
Besides being kept warm by being in the basement, this digester benefits from two additional heat sources:

1) PEX coils (100 feet per tank) inside the tank are connected to the water heater so that we can divert hot water through them whenever we want before it makes its way to the sink or shower.

2) The clothes dryer hot air duct first goes to the bottom of an insulated box that surrounds the digester tanks and then vents to the outside from a duct on the top of the box. This means every time the dryer is used an envelope of hot air is created around the digesters.

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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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Permaculture Community Embraces Puxin Biodigester

Members of Andrew Faust’s Permaculture community participate in the Solar CITIES Training and Build at his Center for Bioregional Living

June 19, 2015

Why is this guy smiling?

Because the Permaculture Movement in New York has embraced the Solar CITIES Biogas Movement. We joined forces to build the state’s first community-scale biodigester, a Solar CITIES variant of the 6m3 Puxin cement system.

We conducted the “wet build” installation at Andrew Faust’s “Center for Bioregional Living”. Two weeks earlier, we brought the molds up from Pennsylvania and did a “dry build” training in the parking lot to show the community what mold-based DIY biodigester systems are all about. Mold-based systems require assembly and disassembly of the molds. During this trip we also identified the best place to do the pour of the wet build.

We decided on a 6m3 system when digging last week with a backloader revealed that we could only go down seven feet before the water table turned the hole into a pond.

To fill in the rapidly waterlogged bottom of the hole, we had to make a square out of 1 x 6 boards into which we piled rocks, wooden boards, and gravel. When we could lay down sheets of rigid blue foam, we lined the whole thing with sheet plastic. Then we put in reinforcing steel mesh and brought in a truck to pour cement.

This resulted in a five-inch base slab sitting on top of about six inches of material on top of the rocks and gravel, giving us less than six feet of depth to work with.

Since a 10m3 system stands at about 9 feet, we had to leave the 4m3 ring out, decreasing the height by 16 inches to about seven feet, eight inches. Given the height of the sewer pipes coming out of the house, which stood a mere foot and half from the ground level, we realized that a six cubic meter system was the tallest we could go and still permit passive drainage of kitchen and toilet wastes into the tank.

Andrew Faust will integrate this build into his Permaculture Design Certificate courses at the Center for Bioregional Living. The digester will take all of the food waste from the Insinkerator Evolution 200 that we had donated to his center, plumbed into the main sewer pipe, as well as all grey water and toilet wastes.

It will be insulated with soy based Polyurethane donated by Lee Stoltzfus from Foam-Tech Insulation and data will be collected for winter performance.

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First Green Faith Build in NY

The First Unitarian Church in Hastings, New York gets its first Solar CITIES IBC biodigester

June 15, 2015

To launch our Green Faith Initiative in New York, Solar CITIES US team built the Empire State’s first biodigester in a house of worship at the First Unitarian Church in Hastings New York. The digester is of the Solar CITIES insulated IBC design and is situated at the church’s community vegetable garden where its fertile liquid compost will turn food wastes back into nutritious food.

The Greening of Greenburgh Begins

Foamed digesters at Yosemite Park in White Plains, NY

June 5, 2015

Greenburgh’s Yosemite Park in White Plains, NY is home to the town’s first summer festival barbecue biogas unit. The digester is a dual IBC polyurethane insulated Solar CITIES system. It should provide gas lamp and cooking demonstrations throughout the summer jazz festival season. This system will be a test of how small-scale biogas/fertilizer systems can function in park settings, using the food waste left behind by patrons of the park and creating useful energy and nutritious liquid compost.

These systems are insulated through a donation by Lee Stoltzfus of Foam-Tech Inc and will help us test cold-climate biodigester performance.