Done Right

Sammy:
The last week has been spent on modifying our humble abode, which has given me the perfect opportunity to test a few of the ideas that i have been researching for the last year.

The first thing I started was a can wall, which is made up of cans and a mix of sand and cement. The principle behind this is that when the cement settles, it creates arches, which in turn holds up the weight of the above cement.

Can walls have a number of advantages compared to a regular brick wall. the first one being that regular bricks cost money – cans cost nothing. If we can teach the locals how do do this it will mean an increased level of living. They are also very good isolators, seeing as the cans are full of air, who are in turn covered with cement and plaster, which also means that sound travels badly through the wall.

During the making of the wall many o khmer came by and looked, all thinking i was a crazy barang, and i tried to explain it to them, and they agreed that it might be a good idea.

The second thing we’ve been building is a solar oven. The basics of the oven are simple, but a metal box in bricks and cement (isolators) paint the whole thing black and smack a big piece of glass on it. what happens is that the rays from the sun hit go through the glass, hitting the black metal, which in turns gets warm, and warms up the air around it, this is why we’re trying to get it compact and airtight. The oven should reach temperatures on between 100 and 200 degrees Celsius.

You can use the solar oven for a number of things, you can bake bread and cook food, and with a small modification you can use it as a solar distiller, this is a good way to get foolproof safe drinking water, but you could also technically use it to distill alcohol, should you which to. (You can make lesser alcohol from bamboo and yeast, which you then distill, which means you could make your own fuel to power generators or vehicles).

You could also combine the solar oven with a toilet, crazy huh? well, what you basically do is make a separate solar oven, build a toilet above it, and the produce drops down in the oven, which is then heated up, becoming a sterile, odorless, energy rich powder, perfect food for plants.

The above are only tests of what we intend to build, strongly inspired by the Earthship concept of living – to live with the earth, not on or against it. Our hope is to be able to build schools and factories in this manner, and teach the locals how to do the same.

- S

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 11:07 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.