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Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) Biodigesters

Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) Biodigesters

February 22, 2017

At the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) across the road from my office at the Patel College of Global Sustainability, T.H. Culhane personally donated, and our students constructed, both a Solar CITIES floating IBC biodigester and my HomeBiogas digester from Israel.  We worked with education leader Ian Reed and high school students from his summer school team. We can now showcase both the DIY digester method and a commercial system side-by-side. This is a great educational opportunity for students and visitors every day.

The original location of the digester was next to the Butterfly Garden. The effluent from the digester caused the Asclepias Milkweed to grow at twice the normal rate to feed the butterfly larvae.  When MOSI closed half of its building, including the garden, we moved the digester out to the parking lot where you can see it today.

You can learn more about this project through this newsclip.

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Whole Earth Festival IBC Biodigester

Redding California’s first Solar CITIES IBC Tank Biodigester

April 25, 2016

Working with Peggy and Pat Rebol and Janessa Gans Wilder, we built this digester in the parking lot of city hall in Redding. This digester was built as part of the Whole Earth Festival. The digester was then set up at the Garden of Hope. See more pictures on Facebook.

IBC Biodigester and Ecotourism

Solar CITIES IBC Biodigester under construction outside the eco-lodge kitchen

March 19, 2016

Solar CITIES’ board members T.H. Culhane and Christopher Lindstrom introduced the Solar CITIES’ IBC biodigester system to the Puerta de la Vida Ecolodge and Retreat Center in San Isidro, Costa Rica. This build demonstrates that biogas can be used in ecotourism businesses.

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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