IBC

At Mercy College in the Fall of 2013 Culhane replaced the two digesters that had been destroyed when his laboratory experiments in room 304 were dismantled and he and Envisaj Mercy Vice President Tasheem Hall filled them with horse manure from the Rockefeller Park stables. One was kept in a shed and the other outside. They both froze solid over the long winter with a polar vortex that kept snow and freezing temperatures until May, and finally started producing gas at the end of May, 2014.

August 3 2012.

James Goodman (youth leader of the the Zombie Response Team of California's San Pedro Forest region) and his family (parents Gary Goodman, Lesly Chamberlain, concert pianist and grandmother Joanne DuBarr, and Africa development specialist Mark David Heath) pose in front of the region's first home scale biodigester (the inexpensive Solar CITIES IBC system), now in place for 'what me worry' disaster response, guaranteeing reliable clean power even when civilization goes down. Bring on the zombies, see if we care...

December of 2011 saw the rhizomal effect of Solar CITIES biogas builds reach ever further -- from a chance encounter in Nairobi to a workshop in Slovakia, within a few months we were in Budapest giving a workshop to see if we could extend the gift of home scale biogas to the Roma -- the gypsies who have been so disenfranchised and abused throughout Eastern Europe.

On 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".

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

See more photos at https://www.facebook.com/thculhane/media_set?set=a.10150814962660551.735622.780590550&type=1

Culhane met the leaders of the Catholic Development Agency Dobra Novina (http://www.dobranovina.sk/) in the Mukuru Slum in Nairobi when we were building our digester for the MAC school.  In September of 2011 they invited him to give a workshop at their retreat in Zazriva.  One of the highlights was the initiation ritural when we were filling the digester tank with manure -- the girls on the team, after a talk about microbiome theory and the idea that God speaks to us trough his Creation, plunged their hands in the cow manure

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 and enjoyed the crowd sourcing, collective intelligence nature of the participants, who came up with many great ideas for improvements!

Alvaro is the "poster-boy" for the success of the "green collar immigrant job training" concept; as a graduate of Trade Tech College's renewable energy program and of T.H. Culhane's early "Eutopia" Class at Jefferson High School in the 1990s where he worked with Culhane on electric and alternative fuel car conversions and green building and solar energy construction. Alvaro worked for Real Goods and for Photovoltaic Installation companies throughout California and now runs his own business in the construction/green retrofit trades and making instructional videos for the hispanic community.

The system is built from three identical IDB Tote HDPE tanks. To the rear one can just make out the biodigester itself. The top of the digester is connected by 1/2 inch clear plastic tubing to the top-side of the water displacement tank (WDT) . Water from this tank is forced by gas coming from the digester out of a length of clear 1/2" plastic tubing from the bottom of this tank that loops over the top of the WDT into the sump (20 gallon plastic garbage bucket in the foreground).  The more gas is forced in the more water is forced out until the sump is about 3/4 full.

Home scale biogas at home. This is where it all began for Solar CITIES co-founder T.H. Culhane when he built his own household biodigester on the family porch in Essen after returning from his first visit to India in January 2009 where he learned about the ARTI India system. Today the Culhane has three biodigesters on the porch -- one ARTI style made from a 500 liter and a 300 liter water barrel and two 1000 liter IBC systems that Culhane innovated himself.