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3 IBC Water Displacement System

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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Our Open-Source Biodigester Model in Action

Visionary permaculturists Paulo Mellett and Fabio Poesia Sambasoul in front of their Insinkerator and Solar CITIES biogas system in Sao Paulo

August 6, 2014

Basic training opportunities in small scale biogas build confidence and familiarity with biogas before launching into a larger community-size builds.

Our Facebook group “Solar CITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners” encourages people around the world to get involved. Individuals, with guidance and advice from members of the Facebook group, build their own small-scale systems so that they gain confidence and expertise and can leverage success at the home-scale to garner larger funding opportunities.

As our network grows, Solar CITIES builds and trainings are beginning to occur in more and more locations. They are led by people who have been inspired by the open-source sustainable development network concept.

Our dear friend Paulo Mellett (RIP brother! We miss you down here!) was a leader in bringing open-source solutions to the world and blessed us when he embraced the Solar CITIES small biogas cause and made it his own.

Before his untimely death from malaria contracted while building biodigesters in Ghana, he made this video of the installation of our open-source Solar CITIES 3 IBC system in Sao Paulo.

We hope this helps others who want to replicate and improve not only the Solar CITIES open-source systems but the philosophy of collective intelligence leading to a better world.  Paulo’s video from Sao Paulo helps others visualize the storage system we developed with Hanna Fathy and Mike Rimoin in 2009 in Cairo. We built this system with Alvaro Silva, Mike Bonifer, and Danny Barth in south Los Angeles in 2010. We also built it in Alaska with Adam Low, in Santa Rosa with Frank Di Massa as well as Slovakia and Budapest in 2011.

This unit in Sao Paulo, Brazil we think is now the only functioning one of its kind. The one in Cairo was discontinued when the teacher at the SEKEM school left, the one in Los Angeles was stolen, the ones in Alaska were dismantled at the end of the project and the storage tanks froze, the one in Northern California was given away to be reassembled some other time, the one in Slovakia has gone off radar, while the one in Budapest was forbidden by authorities to be operated. So this one, run by Fabio Poesia Sambasoul, is the one to watch for future progress on this front. 

Our projects continue in Brazil, both through the work we are doing with Urban BioRecovery: Digesters for Development and through Paulo’s legacy and our commitment to Catalytic Communities.

Biodigester Build in Slovakia

September 25, 2011

We completed a 3 IBC Solar CITIES Biodigester build in the mountain village of Zazriva in Slovakia with the Catholic Youth Group, “Dobrej Noviny”.

After completing the build, we put everything on a trailer and brought it to the home of one of the coordinators of the program for daily use.

Biogas Demonstration and Build in Budapest

Co-creating a better biodigester at the Godor Culture Center in Budapest

August 5, 2011

As a result of our Slovakia workshop, we held a biogas building workshop in Budapest, where I demonstrated the Solar CITIES IBC system for colder climates. I enjoyed the crowd sourcing and collective intelligence nature of the participants who came up with many great ideas for improvements!

We completed a insinkerator-based biogas system at the Godor Culture Center in Budapest (though sans manure and water). Kovách Eszter and Attila Mester did a masterful job of interweaving presentations, breakout-groups, panel discussions and actual BUILDING. As a result the two-day event was both informative and practical. Thank you guys, and thank you Hungary! Let us continue the momentum, transformation “demonstrations” from protests into true “demonstrations” of better ways of living!

Despite the enthusiasm for the project of transducing wastes into gas and fertility, the last message we got from our colleagues in Hungary was that they could not continue the project because “authorities” determined that biogas was somehow “too dangerous” to be brought to the Roma communities. They discouraged our stalwart innoventors and practitioners from going further.

But the beat does go on. The workshop was attended by Swiss Permaculturist Simon Westermann, who took what he learned back to the Damanhur Eco-village in Italy, center of the Global Eco-village Network (GEN), and their scientists built their own IBC based biodigester and are sharing it with the world.

Commercial Biogas System at Harborside Pizza

The flame from the tank at Harborside Pizza, which used a pure core of Lake Cordova mud containing Psychrophiles as startup culture.

January 16, 2010

When local pizza restaurant owner Brian Wildrick and his team Todd Blaisdale and Stan learned from us and the high school students about the technology for turning their kitchen garbage into fertilizer for their fresh tomatoes and fuel to heat the tomato sauce, we and the students built a system with them at Harborside Pizza. This is the first first commercial application of this technology.