Home again, 5/22/14

Home, again Jiggedy jig

Very slow day today, so I got off early.  Yay!  Not so fast.  In my business, which is hot shot delivery, it's 100% commission.  No deliveries, no dough.  So today was not too good.


Never mind that.  It's good to be back in front of the old computer screen doing my blogging thing.

I thought up some ideas today for my going off the grid series.  Thus, this shall be the next in the series.  Aren't you excited?  Wait till you read what I thought up, and you'll get real excited.  heh, heh, heh

A couple problems with that 20 acres out west property.  One, you have to build a septic tank.  Two, you have to have a water source, which could mean building a well.  Both those requirements suck the big one because it could cost big bucks, which I cannot afford.


Necessity being the mother of invention, or just a mother, or what have you, I came up with a way that might handle the number two problem.  What would that be, kemosabe?

Well, you need to recycle the toilet water if the water is going to be scarce.  So, I figured using something like a washer to spin up the, well, you know, so that the water and the, well, you know, gets separated.  You would flush as you normally do now, but instead of the stuff going into a septic tank, it would go into this spinner upper thingie.

It will begin to turn and the stuff would migrate towards the sides.  The water could drain out just like when you do the clothes.  At the end of the spin cycle, the water is gone, and the stuff remains.  Then you pyrolyze the stuff in order to sterilize it, and make it into biochar and biogasses.  The biogass is combustible, so use that in order to run the machine.  But not directly.  The machine will run on batteries, and it will run the spinner upper thingie, and then it will evacuate the air from the thingie.  Once the air is gone, it will heat up the mess, and gasses will come off it.  Gas pressure builds up, and when it reaches a key pressure point, start bleeding it off, and feed that into a machine that will make electricity.

Perhaps it can be a Stirling device.  You would only have to burn the biogasses and that would make the Stirling engine go.  The Stirling engine could spin up a generator which will make electricity to recharge the batteries.

Now that you've got your stuff together, you'll need a water source.  Wait.  What happens to the water that you just separated from the number two?  It should be fairly clean at this point, but it could be allowed to stand for awhile so that any more particulate matter can separate out.  Then drain that off and sterilize it.  Send it back to a holding tank for the next flush.

A water source will have to be rainwater.  If it rains only 10 inches a year out in West Texas, you can figure out about how much water can be collected per square foot.  Make a system whereby the water can be collected and I think it may be enough, provided that you are very careful with your water.  Ten inches is .83 feet.  So, .83 times 1 is .83 cubic feet.  For each square foot, you will have the potential for .83 cubic feet of water.  That translates into  6.23 gallons per square foot per year.

If you use 4000 square feet for structures for your farm, then that translates out to nearly 25k gallons a year, or about 2k gallons per month, or 68 gallons per day.  Will that be enough?  Probably enough for drinking water, but don't know about farming.

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