Projects

Our 4th of 7 biogas workshops in Ireland took place at a permaculture community garden in Clonakilty, West Cork, just up the street from the hardware store. Into this IBC tank we put pex heating coils similar to what we have done in New York and Pennsylvania, but connected them to a layered compost pile with a circulation pump so extract heat from aerobic composting Jean Pain style.

Our third of 7 biodigesters in seven locations in Ireland was built in a workshop organized by Eimhin David Callanan that took place in Timoleague West Cork at a family farm.

A home bio digester workshop was  hosted at Bia Oisin, Claregalway by global nomads Dr. T.H. Culhane and Dr. Sybille Culhane as they work on the Solar C.3.I.T.I.E.S. mission: "Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions" where T.H demonstrated how to build a 1200 litre bio digester from materials costing only €105 capable of producing enough gas to cook three meals a day from one bucket of food waste.

The Solar CITIES Blue Flame tour of Ireland kicked off on Friday July 3rd 2015 with a community build of a Solar CITIES IBC biodigester in the Birr Community Growery in the historic town of Birr (Gaelic for "The Wells"; interestingly Bir also means "well" in Arabic!).

On Friday John Maer, preacher, teacher and visionary, was giving us a tour of his amazing Practical Education Center, based around Aquaponics on our last evening in the Ft. Lauderdale area,  when we spied an IBC tank lying around. We had been talking about how we might integrate small scale biogas systems education into their curriculum all afternoon, and snce I istill had some uniseals and plumbing parts in the car from our previous Florida builds I said, "I don't suppose we could just do a quick build right here and now and get the ball rolling..."

The value of bringing the Solar CITIES Biogas circus on the road comes from the number of people we meet who are ready to embrace home scale biogas once they learn how simple it is to do.  Rodrigo Lima met us at the Ft. Lauderdale Green Planet festival in one of our workshop sessions and spent time with us at our booth and immediately joined our facebook group.

At Tree Hugger farms we built an IBC digester that was innoculated with humanure from their composting toilets.

We met the incredible organic farmer Alex McCrae, of English and Jamaican origin, at the Green Planet Festival in the fall and he immediately expressed his enthusiasm for the small scale biogas revolution.  As it turned out, he already had an IBC tank and plumbing parts on site at his organic farming education center in Davie Florida, so it was a simple matter for us to drop by with the uniseals and put together a Solar CITIES DIY system in less than an hour.

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.

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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 on a sunny Sunday in mid June, making it a true Holy day for us.  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. 

Greenburgh's Yosemeti Park in White Plains, NY, just got the town's first summer festival barbecue biogas unit, a dual IBC polyurethane insulated Solar CITIES system that should provide gas lamp and cooking demonstrations throughout the summer jazz festival sessions.  It 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.