Tokyo Babylon

I believe the key to a self sufficient home is to build with what is close to hand and to integrate it into the surrounding environment so that natural material and energy flows work with the building not against it. The eventual goal being to produce energy and material surpluses out of the house. I do not think that I am being unrealistic in this. The difference between designing to take advantage of free energy and material flows is probably very similar to the difference between cycling uphill and cycling downhill. Your design will dictate which one of those directions you will move in.

The tech is already available to get us there. Another thing is that though you will have to go to the bank to get finance for this as time goes on and you put your work into your self sufficient home your costs will go down and your cashflow will increase. Instead of transferring your heating gas to your window to the outside air, design it so you don’t need heating in the first place and so convert that loss into dollars to pay off your mortgage faster.

Financially the killer is loss of cashflow. Maintain your cashflow and your savings will accumulate, such that every project that you undertake after that will be financed out of your own pocket and you can tell your bank manager what you think of him. This is at the foundation of the Toyota Production System; a system that has ensured Toyota never needs to borrow cash or lay off workers in lean times.

I hope this will be an interactive series of posts, since to construct a house like this will require a great many system components to operate in synergy with each other to the benefit of the system as a whole.

Now if I were to build this house in East Timor then I would have to think about how to build it and power it first.

The Belononio Oven, which runs on rice husks seems like the way to go. It utilizes a waste product, rice husk, which is generally dumped by the side of roads. If you burn it then people downwind develop breathing problems. It’s a waste product for most people but not for people who have the tech to hand to be able to convert it into a resource. The Belonio Gasifier when combined it with a stirling engine would amount to a combined heat and power unit; the basis of a miniature production facility. As far as I know only a Danish company, Stirling Danmark (Website: http://www.stirling.dk/) has explored this possibility, but when you consider that the Belonio gasifier is basically a furnace radiating heat into the air whilst producing gas for a burner you have to consider that there should be some better way of putting that heat to use, perhaps a steam engine/turbine. I know the Israelis developed a low pressure steam turbine which they have successfully used with solar ponds. it produces power from water temperatures below boiling point. If I had an electric vehicle then I’ve already got the basis of several businesses.

Apparently many farmers mix rice husks back into the soil, but the problem with that is silica content of rice husks is high, which means it acts like those little packs of silica crystals you get in food packages which say “do not eat” on them. Being a dessicant means that it attracts and traps water molecules, which is why you find it in packs of foods which normally absorb water. What that does is compete with plant roots for water, not something you want.

Now I have as much Rice Husk Ash as I can use. Rice Husk Ash can replace up to half the Portland Cement component of concrete so anything I build with concrete will be cheaper now. Incidentally it will also be better since Rice Husk Ash also makes concrete more water resistant. Then again there is a rock called Tufa which the Romans used when they were still building with bronze tools. It’s light, easy to cut, hardens slowly on contact with air and is freely available on East Timor. If I want something earthquake resistant then I’d better use bamboo. Luckily bamboo grows easily in East Timor. So with a little portland cement bought in and the rest obtained through cultivation or scavenging I’ve got the basis of a house and all it would need is some detailed plans to work from since the Belonio furnace keeps my power tools topped up. Now here’s a thought if RHA concrete is non porous and tufa is porous what effects can you get when you add water?

So my Belononio stove would be the basis for two businesses, either Rice Husk Ash or Rice Husk Char, both of which I can use for building, growing or selling. Rice Husk Ash I can sell to builders undercutting cement producers. Rice Husk Char I can sell to farmers, though it is likely that they would quickly make their own. Straight away I’m looking at flexible production from by stove, which product does it make sense for me to make within the current market conditions? I have the choice, which improves the resiliency of my system.

Of course as soon as farmers started seeing me using their rice husks as a business material they would start charging me for it, but that’s not all bad. Since if you have a computer and electric vehicles your house would be at the base of a rice husk delivery business taking it from the countryside to the cities. So you’ve moved from a rice husk product facility to a rice husk transportation facility using a portion of the rice husks to carry more rice husks into the city. Of course you’d then carry the rice husk ash to a company that uses it such as a cement or steel plant. Business upon business, upon business.

Now what can we use hot water for? Well several thoughts come to mind immediately; sterilization, washing clothes and cooking. The first is very useful for mushroom production, since you need to ensure that only the mushrooms you want to grow actually do so since mushroom spores are everywhere. The second means that you can run a kitchen and a laundry out of your house without paying for energy.

Add on other sources of electricity and you could run your battery power car for free. Imagine that, a rice field powering your transport system. The payback period on such systems tend to be short after which you’re in a situation of not paying for many of the inputs that your competitors are.

So, at the moment we have a house which operates as a laundry, a mushroom farm, a concrete additive business, an electricity generating station, a char production facility for terra preta and a kitchen. None of it is particularly high tech.

So with rice husks we’ve pretty much got our energy needs and soil fertilizer problems sorted, we’ve developed a business that we run out of our house.

Now what if you have some land next to your house? Well obviously you’ll want to grow things there both for your own consumption and also to sell on the market. Now the price that you sell at is going to bear some relationship to what the market will bear and your production costs. If selling it does not meet your production cost then obviously you wont do it.

Now contrary to popular belief small farms are much more efficient in their use of resources than large farms. A system designed organic farm would be much more efficient by several orders of magnitude. In an age where an increasing number of consumers want to enter into a relationship with the people who grow their food so that they can know where their food comes from and how it is made there are many possibilities for even small producers to find a niche to operate in.

An industrial farm is basically one huge field, filled with one plant, sprayed with chemicals and tailored so as to be harvested by machines. That makes whatever comes out of a commodity basically; like coal from a mine. Industrial farming operates like a factory and that’s what you get- mass production. There is only rule to farming of this nature and that is produce as much as you can as cheaply as you can whilst leaning on the government to subsidize your crop up the wazoo. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Nature doesn’t like zero biodiversity and basically goes after it like Elliott Ness after Capone. If you’ve seen the movie The Untouchables you’ll know what I’m getting at. As the world’s next sexiest man Sean Connery’s character said..

“You wanna know how you do it? Here’s how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

The natural equivalent is. Man produces new strains of seed, new pesticides and herbicides. Nature comes back with a rot that the new seed has no resistance to, improved bugs that munch on crops with the spray acting as salad dressing and herbicide resistant plants. Now the problem is if you spray more and more it ends up in the drinking water and starts killing the crop that you’re trying to grow. It’s an arms race and nature isn’t the one spending more and more money fighting it.

So in my next entry I’ll talk about what I’d like to see on the land to support me and mine, my community. I’d also mention how to link this to sanitation so we can go from dumper to bumper crops..