Since 2006 the Solar C³ITIES team has been assisting communities around the world in the development of their own sustainability solutions.
Bring Solar C³ITIES home and community scale biodigestion to your community!
Florida got its first backyard biodigester on May 25, 2015 when Solar CITIES biogas evangelists T.H. Culhane and Tim Laugher drove to Florida from New York to start the biogas wave, building five IBC digesters in five locations in 5 days. This was the first, a blessing for the launch of our Green Faith mission, dedicating our biogas initiative to the glory of God.
April 11 2015 marks the inception of Pennsylvania's second Solar CITIES Puxin Biodigester, this one a 6m3 system that will act as the predigester for Keppy Arnoldsen's own unique digester design. A notable lack of nuts and bolts in critical joint areas led to the outer mold wall bursting under the pressure of the truck poured concrete, but the team recovered and repaired the damage with no real harm done.
At the end of our service learning trip to the Dominican Republic Envisaj Mercy students and Solar CITIES co-founder T.H. Culhane introduced the IBC/ARTI hybrid system to the Batey Relief Alliance Center for AgroPecuaria.
"La Bomba de Cenovi": The Dominican Republic's first Hestia Home Biodigester at the home of Tesori Alvarez in San Francisco de Macoris.
Let freedom ring! In the land of the Liberty Bell a new bid for independence has been launched with the creation of America's first Puxin 10m3 biogas system at the homestead farm of Jody and Bob Spangler. Built by our Solar CITIES team with help from Envisaj Mercy students and community members, the successful completion of a biogas system of this size in the winter gives us a chance to evaluate performace throughout the cold months and make the necessary improvements so that this size class of small scale biogas can get off the launchpad in the good 'old US of A.
By nightfall on Monday, December 29th, 2014, just as the downpour of rain started, we miraculously finished building and commissioning the Yucatan's first urban biogas digester, using our Solar CITIES mod to the ARTI design. On the 31st we modified another rotoplas tank as a closed digester to take more urban food waste and increase capacity.
Simon, the grandfather of Google Science Fair/Scientific American Science in Action prize winner Sakhiwe Songhe, lives on a farm in Swaziland outside Manzini where he has fruit orchards and keeps cattle, geese, and chickens. It is here that Sakhiwe and Bonkhe are conducting this year's follow up to their hydroponics experiments, showing the farming community that you can acheive at least twice the yield on Swaziland's poor land using compost to build soil.
August 19 2014 saw Dr. T.H. Culhane and Google Science Fair Finalist Rohit Fenn (an Indian youth who designed a more efficient toilet) and his older brother, evolutionary biologist Amit Fenn, travelling to Swaziland to work with Science in Action winners Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, adding the 'food waste to fuel and fertilizer' biogas solution to their toolkit for improved low cost hydroponics in Swaziland.
At Principia College during the sustainability conference we built a functioning mini-digester out of paint buckets. It really works and not only teaches the principles but gives a few minutes of daily gas!
Rotoplas engineers pleasantly surprised Culhane during his spring 2014 Mexico visit by showing him a Solar CITIES style modified ARTI digester (with the "microbial motels" we put in to increase surface area in Kenya with the Maasai in 2010) that they built in anticipation of his visit for testing as the company explores its own line of rotomolded home biogas systems (Rotoplas is already the top producer of home scale "biodigestores" in central and south America for treating toilet wastes, though
A couple of years ago a young man named Jorma Gorns from the Gymnasium Altenholz in Kiel, northern Germany, wrote Solar CITIES a letter asking if it would be possible to intern with us on some project around the world. A year later he took the train down and came to stay with us in Essen and helped Culhane redesig the ARTI gas holder on the porch. A year after that he raised funds from his school and came to work with Culhane at Mercy College in New York for a week and then in Niteroi and Rio in Brazil for a week, gaining expertise in IBC and Puxin designs. Once back in Germany he and
Pages
