permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Hi again--

Plans for a permaculture apartment can run the gamut from a bean sprouter placed in your sunny-side window to a radical new design for living. One such is an ingenious adaptation of geothermal energy based on the fact that ten feet below your floorboards, the ground temperature is the average of your area's summer and winter temperatures. That's why when they homesteaded the American Midwest, the old sodbusters used to dig out their homes and put a roof over the pit. It was just warmer in winter, cooler in summer down there (not to mention being a handy retreat from tornados).

I wouldn't know where on the web this might be described, but a number of years back some engineers designed a house that cycled coolant water through underground channels-- the test house was built on impervious stone but the design principle would also hold true for tubing coils set in a bed of sand-- and then cycled it through a heat pump for some peak-demand boost. The result was a house with almost no energy inputs for cooling and heating as it had a natural supply of 70 degree water year-round. The drawback-- very expensive to build. That's why the design has never become popular.

Put up a windmill and such a structure could become self-sustaining, powering your lights, stove and computer as well, during those months when the wind was blowing. You could even sell your excess energy back to the grid. But this is a little ambitious for someone living in an apartment. It would be an incredible design however for a new apartment building.

A setup like this on a farm would work even better, if you raised animals. Collecting the gases from your waste pit anaerobically and burning them for electricity is a relatively low-tech enterprise, and is becoming successfully established in the more progressive hog-farming community.

Finally, in a couple of years we should have less expensive, small scale units to crack water into hydrogen, which is an excellent way to store electricity. They already have good, fairly expensive models on the market. Run your windmill for those few months of the year that it performs work, and store the work as hydrogen. It then translates into electricity when you need it, solving the storage-and-transmission problem notorious to electricity.

As the wise man saith-- with enough money, all things are possible. On a larger scale, the money problem arising from such design elements becomes much more manageable- say as a plan for a permaculture community with housing, nursery and husbandry functions combined. Look for a grant, to give your ground-breaking efforts an assist. It would make a viable research project if thoughtfully designed.

Just a thought.

Mike Elvin