<intro/housekeeping 0:00 – 5:22>
Jack Spirko: With that I got the house keeping wrapped up. I would like to again welcome back to the show for his 7th appearance, Steven Harris. Steven is an awesome guy. He worked at Chrysler for over 10 years on their hydrogen fuel projects. He is the author of several books. He has a great company with a tremendous amount of books, resources and material to lean about alternative energy. From bio-gas to solar and wind and more. If you want to know about it, Steve is the answer man. That is what he is here to talk to us about today. Hey Steven welcome back to The Survival Podcast.
<5:53>
Steven Harris: Jack, I am thrilled to be back. I am going to dish out the secrets. I am going to spill the beans on everything that works and everything that doesn't work. We are going to cover all the subjects.
<6:03>
Jack Spirko: Very very cool. This is your 5th appearance. You have been back more than anyone else.
<6:09>
Steven Harris: Sixth appearance. Number six.
<6:10>
Jack Spirko: You are right. Six... that is in your notes. <laughs> I guess you were noting you fifth appearance was your last one.
<6:18>
Steven Harris: Yeah, my fifth appearance was my last one. We are going to talk about that and answer some questions. This is show number six.
<6:26>
Jack Spirko: Very very cool. Do you have some stuff from the last show that you wanted to chat about or that got left unsaid?
<6:37>
Steven Harris: You can get the last show at Jack's website, he has a whole page from me. It is also at Solare1234.com. I have all my shows listed and the details. The last show was on solar heat. I went over solar heat and how good solar heat was. Solar heat is real solar energy. It works just fabulous. You can get your return on investment in days, weeks, or months. We covered the subject so well, we didn't really get many questions on the subject. It is the first thing that I have here in my notes to talk about. Basically solar heat, go back and listen to the last show. I will keep this short, just go back and listen to the last show. I tell you how your can a solar heater, put it in your window, blow hot air into your house. You are heating with hot air and you store heat in water is the general rules of thumb. You can get started with free glass, a two by four, and old door, some black paint, and some muffin fans used for computers. You can slope the thing down from your window, put it in like an air conditioner, sunshine hits it, and blows free heat in. It works great in all different climates in the United States, except for Alaska. You will have a little difficulty there, being dark 24 hours a day for part of the time. I had a special for just Jack's TSP people last month, it was a sell out. Everyone just loved it. I didn't expect the number of sales that I got. It is for "Sunshine To Dollars," that is my famous book that tells you how to get free glass for doing solar heating. Tells you how to make solar ovens, two of them in there. One is a great big one that I made from an old freezer. I show you how to bake bread and to bake a cake in it. The other one is the complete handbook of "Solar Air Heating Systems." This is the one that tells you to professionally install solar heating into your house, as if you were a commercial builder. How to do it at that level, to do it to code, and to do it perfectly so it will last as long as the house. The other book is "Movable Insulation" which tells you how to put up and take down insulation. Basically let the sunshine in during the day time in the window and then put insulation up on the window at night to keep the heat in. The trio of books is awesome. It is only $49 dollars for all three books, that is a saving of $25. For all of you Membership Support Brigade people, join the MSB because your 15% discount applies to the $49 price so you can get it even cheaper.
<9:44>
Jack Spirko: That is awesome. I love that you do that when you run a special. I am sure might be some things where you can't do it because your stoves and stuff are really hard to discount. The fact that you do it when you can we appreciate that so thanks a lot for that. Folk again, you can get that at Solar1234.com and I will absolutely make sure that is in the show notes as well.
<10:06>
Steven Harris Good. That kind of covers solar heat. Just go back and listen to show number five. It is the best thing you can do. There is one thing we have never covered in all of our shows, except for the fact that I don't like it.
<10:19>
Jack Spirko: That you hate it and that is photo voltaic, so we have really not ever talked about it. But we are going to talk about it today.
<10:25>
Steven Harris: Yes we are. Solar PV, I call it the worse thing that ever happen to solar energy. I work with large scale solar energy. I am in favor of, do research work, and development work on big dishes. 30 foot dishes that you point at the sun and they make 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. At 4000 degrees Fahrenheit you can take garbage and turn it into carbon and run steam through it. You can make hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Then you run that through a generator and that spins a turbine that spins a generator, which is made of copper. That make real three phase high voltage AC. That is real solar power. That is what the future of solar power is going to be. That is how mass solar power currently is, as opposed to these flat panels that everyone thinks is nirvana because they are flat and sexy looking. You put them out there and they produce electricity, but they produce DC electricity. We all run on AC electricity. In order to convert AC to DC what do you need? You need more electronics, which is more expenditure. You also need batteries to store it in, which is more expenditure right there. You can never really get your money out of solar photovoltaic because the crystalline solar panels are grown with electricity. They do the vapor deposition of silicon, meaning they heat it up under a very high pure heat and turn it to a gas and then deposit it to make the pure silicon which is then doped and made into the solar photovoltaic panels that you put out into the sunshine. It takes a great deal and huge amount of electricity to make these solar cells. Basically what you are doing is you are making these solar cells in Japan with nuclear electricity then you are moving them over to the United States and then putting them into the sunshine and getting your electricity out. That are not a successful large scale form of electricity. In fact, they are the most expensive form of electricity you are going to get. It is like taking 20 years of your electricity bills and spending all the money all at once.
<12:44>
Jack Spirko: I want to explain some other things around that. If we go to a state with the highest possible insurance (electric?) rates because socialist stupidity like California. Then we get the best possible deal we can on the solar panel. Maybe we can shorten that payback time in money by something. The way I prefer to look at is we are supposedly doing this for creating energy. My view is if I took that same solar panel and used one 250 watt solar panel, high efficiency panel. Then said I am going to use energy from this panel and sort it in battery banks until I have any enough energy to build one more panel, that is going to take me about 30 years isn't it?
<13:30>
Steven Harris: Yeah. Exactly.
<13:31>
Jack Spirko: That is the payback period I am really interested in. Not just money but how much energy produce to make the energy that goes in.
<13:39>
Steven Harris: Exactly. True. That doesn't even take into account that your battery is not last 30 years. Your battery is going to last 10 years, so you are replacing the battery. Let me put this straight forward to you. Solar photovoltaic, even though the prices have fallen and everything else. There is no reason in the world, even with any government credits and anything which is just theft of money from you and me, to do it for economic purposes. You are not going to put them up and make money. There is only one reason to use solar photovoltaic. That is for a signification portion of this audience and that is you want true energy independence. You want energy Independence from the grid. Solar photovoltaic can start you on that path to be completely energy independent, but it is going to be your most expensive electricity that you are going to buy. You are not going to save money, you are going to spend more money. You are going to have more maintenance, more time spent on things, and more tied to your house which isn't normally a bad thing. But you are going to be more energy independent. The grid can go down and you are still going to be surviving. You don't size the photovoltaic panels to your house. You don't say, "I got my refrigerator that I bought at Lowe's and I got my 3 ton air conditioning system so I am going to buy all these panels." No No, you size the house to the number of the photovoltaic panels you can buy. Even with $20,000 worth of panels you are still not running your central air conditioning system, let alone at night or 24 hours a day. When you buy solar photovoltaic panels you are generally using the special Sun Frost high efficiency refrigerator that uses a lot less power. You get a special high efficiency freezer. Of course you are switching all of your light to compact florescent and LED based. You are not leaving the TV on all the time. You are being real miserly with your power. For a dishwasher with electric heat in it, basically forget it. You are not running electric hot water heat either. You are doing something else for your how water, either natural gas or propane.
<16:09>
Jack Spirko: Probably gas or propane. You are right back to fossil fuels there.
<16:12>
Steven Harris: Verses solar, exactly. It can buy you a significant portion of energy independence. That can be very valuable to some of your listeners. I don't want to poop poop it.
<16:28>
Jack Spirko: I think what you are saying is OK. If I am going to build an Earthship in the middle of the New Mexico desert and it is going to cost me $80,000 to run infrastructure and to bring power. Or build something in Maine in the woods with a cabin where there is no infrastructure. Then it is the best thing for some portion of my energy needs.
<16:46>
Steven Harris: There is one thing more expensive than solar photovoltaic power and that is no electricity. <Jack laughs> That is even more expensive.
<16:57>
Jack Spirko: Remember the show "Little House on the Prairie?" Watch a couple episodes of that and you will see how valuable a solar panel is.
<17:04>
Steven Harris: Exactly. If you are going to do an off grid situation in the woods, solar photovoltaic is going to be one of the chief things you are going to be relying upon. You might put up a 80 foot tower for wind, which we will cover. Let's cover some of the economics of solar photovoltaic. The payback time is generally considered 30 years If you factor in labor, other cost, the inverter, and the battery life if you are using batteries. Which is the whole grid tied versus non-grid tied discussion. The only way you can store energy to be energy independent is with batteries. Your batteries are going to take up a lot of money and they have a lifespan, so you really won't get your money back. Lets look at some of the basics. Today is valentines day 2012 (Tuesday, February 14 2012). People could be listening to this to this thing in 2022, so we will give the date. A Sharp solar panel is running about $2.75 a watt. That is for the panel, not including shipping, mounting, mounts, labor, inverters, and batteries. If you go to some off brand panels right now you are looking at $1.99 a watt, which is a record low price. This is what China is doing. It is one of the reasons Solara went out of business, because China is making them cheaper than they are even with their government funding and out they go. They are about $1.99 or $2 a watt. That is $2 a watt per solar panel. If you get a 100 watt panel and you put it out in the sun shine, you don't get 100 watts for every hour of sunshine. There is something called means solar hours because the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west. Is you panel tracking the sun? If you panel is tracking the sun. There is a great deal of expense right there having a tracker for all those solar panels, which is easily the price of the panels and more. If you got just a panel out there at a optimal angle facing south, you know there is 12 hours of sunlight in a good sunny day. You are getting maybe 5 or 6 mean solar hours, which means 5 or 6 hours equivalent of you panel putting out a 100 watts. There is that factor to consider in. Remember this is a $1.99 a watt. This is really $2,000 per kilowatt is what you are paying. What does a kilowatt cost us in the real world in the mid west or the east coast area? Remember i said $2,000 a kilowatt for solar panels. That same kilowatt is costing us $0.085. When you divide $2000 pre kilowatt hour into $0.085 cents pre kilowatt hours cost. You are going to have to have 23,500 mean solar hours to get your money back. That is mean solar hours at maximum output, sunrises and sunsets and you are tracking the sun, to get the max out of your panel. 12 hours of sunlight, that is 6 mean solar hours, divide that by 6 and you get 4,000 days to get your money back at $0.085 that we are paying here in the mid west on a $2 a watt panel. That is basically eleven years just to get your money back on the panel. Not the mounting, labor, wiring, battery, or inverter. Your batteries won't last 10 years. That depends upon the chemistry of the battery, how the plates are formated, and how deeply you discharge the batteries. You can just take your lead acid battery all the way down to nothing and charge them back up and then all the way back down to nothing and then change them back up. Even if they are deep cycle batteries, it still hurts them to take them all the way down to nothing. The properly operating solar panels system, you take your batteries down to 50% and then charge them back up and them take them down to 50% and then charge them back up, so you get a lot more life out of your batteries. People don't realize this. If you need to have double your storage, you just have to double your batteries. That becomes a big expense and takes up a lot of space.
<21:54>
Jack Spirko: Now you know why Steve hates photovoltaic.
<21:57>
Steven Harris: Yes, but I am trying to bite my tongue and say there is applications for them. Especially with energy independence. That is why I am here. That is why I want to give some of these details to your people. <phone rings> And I forgot to silence my phone. There, I have silenced my phone.
<22:14>
Jack Spirko: No big deal, man.
<22:15>
Steven Harris: Where was I in my notes... There you go, 11 years. As I was saying solar PV for power independence. It is not for economics. You don't size the solar panels to the house, you size the house to your solar panels. You get the high efficiency refrigerator and freezer. Here is where it becomes a little different situation. If you are in Hawaii, I looked up there average electrical costs and had friends in Hawaii send me their power bills. These are actual numbers. We are paying $0.085 here in the Midwest. California is paying $0.22 because of their socialist pricing for electricity. Hawaii is paying $0.45 and sometime more per kilowatt hour. You are looking at 4.5 to 5.5 times the price of what we are paying. Now we start factoring that in. Then you look a the Bahamas is about $0.38 per kilowatt hour. You are looking at a return on investment of about 3 years, so that is where the numbers start becoming interesting. Remember there is a price for living in paradise and that is it. In Hawaii their electricity is 2,000 miles from people.
<23:50>
Jack Spirko: It is also an island and that is a big part of issue.
<23:53>
Steven Harris: Yeah.
<23:53>
Jack Spirko: You have to get the power to the island and they can only generate so much power on the island.
<23:57>
Steven Harris: Right.
<23:57>
Jack Spirko: If they are going to build... I don't even know if they have the capacity to build any more energy production there, because of all the environmental protection. Which it is a place to protect but you are dealing with that situation. Even if you did have all of the facilities to produce more power, right on the island, then you also have to get fuel to the island. You have to ship the coal, oil, or nuclear material in and out. It is a very different situation when you are on an island verses a continent.
<24:29>
Steven Harris: Right, they are pretty much geothermal and diesel based in Hawaii. Most islands around the world have big diesel generators that generate electricity. They bring in diesel by the millions of gallons on tankers and barges. They put them into great big tank farms. Their price of electricity is directly tied to the price of diesel fuel. If you are on an island, like Fiji, Tahiti, or one of the many Pacific islands you have a big shipping cost on getting those solar panels to you as well. It is not just going to be the price of the panels. It is also going to be the price of the shipping, then your effort to put them up, and your limited resources there to put them up. It gives you an idea that when you are starting to look at energy independence and your cost of electricity, like you said, is going to be $0.45 to $0.50 a kilowatt hour. Or it is going to cost you $20,000 in poles for the electric company to put in poles and wire. Now you are looking at something that a return on investment on, only because your base price for electricity could begins with is so high.
<25:45>
Jack Spirko: It is very situationally dependent. In your estimation, because they can make far more efficient panels for far less money today than they could 25 years ago. I there a pathway ever, where photovoltaic through manufacturing improvement and efficiency improvements can ever work? Is this a stepping stone? Is it a stepping stone, but there is a shit load of stepping stones between here and Nirvana?
<26:24>
Steven Harris: That is an incredible and fabulous question. Not even one in 10,000 would have asked that question. There is one stepping stone for photovoltaic to become operational with return on investment. That is what is called concentrated photovoltaic. That is where you take a Fresnel lens and it has a surface area of one square foot and concentrate that one square foot of solar energy hitting the Fresnel lens down into about one square inch of photostatic. And it is not just sitting there, because photovoltaic like to start dying above a 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Here you are concentrating sunlight from 144 square inches down to 1 square inch, enough easily to make over a 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, on to sensitive silicon electronics that don't want to get over a 150 (degrees Fahrenheit). What they have (to prevent this) is active cooling on the back end of them to take this heat away as fast as it can while still using the photons from the sunlight to generate electricity. I have seen concentrated photovoltaic. I have seen state of the art concentrated photovoltaic. The Arizona Public Service Company called APS (
www.aps.com). The STAR facility in Phoenix, Arizona has some of the best concentrated solar photovoltaic research being done. There will become a time when this going to be economical. Again, concentrated solar photovoltaic... I have seen these great big flat panels that are 150 feet by 150 feet. They are gargantuan. They look like they are from NASA. They have to track the sun.
<28:12>
Jack Spirko: Sure
<28:12>
Steven Harris: If you are doing concentrated (solar photovoltaic), you have to point it straight at the sun as it comes up in the east, follow it above to it's zenith, and all the way down to the west. You just can't put them out (there) <audio cuts out>....
<28:22>
Jack Spirko: That would be more of a mass production (thing). That is not be something you are going to install on a roof. You have dangers there, like setting houses on fire.
<28:31>
Steven Harris: No, no. I mean in a mass produced situation it would be very safe... The flame of your hot water heater in your house and in your furnace, is hotter than what this gets to.
<28:46>
Jack Spirko: Sure.
<28:46>
Steven Harris: It it pretty safe from that point of view. Again, it is a Fresnel lens. It is a expensive, multi-depth chip, solar photovoltaic chip, with an active cooling system. Which means water, pumps, fans, heat exchanger, and a tracking system. These be coming about some decade (later on) for a large solar farms. These will again compete with what I do, which is a large solar concentrator doing high temperature solar chemistry to make hydrogen that goes into a generator that spins a turbine that makes electricity indirectly. When you spin a copper generator, you make direct three-phase electricity. It is power matched and high voltage. Even with concentrated solar photovoltaic you are still looking at making DC current that needs to be converted to AC with silicon electronics. It still doesn't have a power factor matching that is worth a darn to it, which is beyond this discussion.
<29:59>
Jack Spirko: Sure.
<29:59>
Steven Harris: That was a really good question. There is one thing coming up if you really what to do solar PV cheap. There are people in companies selling solar photovoltaic kits. You have seen these advertisements on the net. "Man finds secret and brakes loose from the electric company." Blah blah blah. "Buy it before it gets shut down." <Jack laughs> It is just all hype and BS. All they are doing is taking surplus cells, which in many cases are sub cells or B-grade. They are junk. They have a chip on them. They are not quite as efficient. They weren't the right size.
<30:39>
Jack Spirko: Factory seconds.
<30:40>
Steven Harris: Factory seconds. They made to many of them, whatever. They are taking the cells that you would buy at Radio Shack... we used to buy single solar cells at Radio Shack at one time for experiments. They will sell you a conducting ribbon that you can solder to. They will also sell you some special silver solder. You can solder together your own solar panel. But then you also have to mount it behind glass or Plexiglas and blah blah blah... Very labor intensive. Remember we are going to come back to some of these numbers. I am going to blow you away with some of these numbers. I said $2 per watt for a low price solar panels right now. If you make your own, you can do this for less than a $1 a watt. If you take less then a $1 a watt and you are in Hawaii at $0.45 per kilowatt hour, then you are looking at a return on investment pretty decent. That is assuming you have the skill, the time, and the materials.
<31:44>
Jack Spirko: And you value your hours that you will spend doing this at Zero.
<31:47>
Steven Harris: That is right
<31:49>
Jack Spirko: It is a hobby for you and you need something to do with the time anyways. It doesn't really hurt anything.
<31:54>
Steven Harris: It is a lot of work. It is great learning experience. If something goes wrong with your panels, you will know how to fix them. I won't ever fault anyone doing an endeavor of labor like this because you learn a great deal of things. If you want to try it go for it. eBay is the best place to get them because there is so many people with so many competing different kits that the prices are pretty decent. I went and looked them up before I went on the show. They are going for less than a $1 a watt, somewhere between $0.60 and $0.70 per watt. That doesn't include the price of the Plexiglas or the glass that you need to use.
<32:38>
Jack Spirko: If they get your book, you tell them how to get glass for free.
<32:42>
Steven Harris: Yes, in "Sunshine to Dollars" is a great book. I show you have to get glass for free. I am going to tell you right here on Jack's show. I tell you how to go to your local window glass company and say, "Hey, instead of you putting glass into the dumpster. Can I take it for free?" I tell you how to approach them, how to ask them, what to say, and everything else. Most places say, "Yeah. Sure! Of course."
<33:08>
Jack Spirko: Sure, they don't have to pay the dumpster man to dump it that week.
<33:11>
Steven Harris: They don't have to pay the dumpster man and everything else. There are little secrets to it. When they call you, you got to be there. Be nice and bring them pizza.
<33:22>
Jack Spirko: Don't say, "I won't want all of that." You have to take it all too.
<33:26>
Steven Harris: Yeah, you got to take all of it too. Bring a pizza, beer, doughnuts, or cookies. Be nice to to them and be there buddies. So they can call you and depend on you. That is all detailed in "Sunshine to Dollars." "Sunshine to Dollars" even tells you how to get free solar photovoltaic panels. I found places where you can get photovoltaic panels that have been damaged. They do nothing but through them into the Dumpster. They still operate at 1/3 and 1/2 of there original power. I got 85 of them in 2 years. I covered my entire garage with them. There is a picture of me in the advertisement for "Sunshine to Dollars" standing on top of my garage with 85 solar photovoltaic panels laid out.
<34:14>
Jack Spirko: If you want to get some return of investment. That is the way to do it. If you can scavenge the stuff for free. Then someone else already took the hit on it.
<34:24>
Steven Harris: Yeah, literally took the hit on it like in the book.
<34:28>
Jack Spirko: Yeah, I got the joke there. Lets move on to some other ways of producing energy. Lets talk a little bit about biogas. That was the first thing we had you on for.
<34:36>
Steven Harris: The first show you had me on was for biogas. This biogas is methane. It is anaerobic digestor. Anaerobic means without oxygen. Basically you take a great big tank, a great big jug, a great big container, a 55 gallon drum, 320 tote, or something and your through a bunch of manure into it. Then you can load it up with stick and twigs, leaves, and grass clippings if you want.
<35:06>
Jack Spirko: Or rotten fruit.
<35:07>
Steven Harris: Rotten fruit, dog poo, and small furry animals that you ran over on the road that you don't want to eat. You can through everything in there. What happens is when you close it up and you leave a vent hole, which is where your gas comes out. What happens is all the aerobic bacteria that is in the manure, air that we are breathing, and is in our bodies and small furry creatures. The aerobic bacterial take over and they start eating everything until all of the oxygen is out of the liquid slurry that is in there. Then the anaerobic, with out oxygen, take over because of all the oxygen eating bacteria died off because they ran out of oxygen. The anaerobes take over and they start digesting everything. What do the anaerobes do? They make methane. Methane is natural gas. It is flammable. It is a great wonderful fuel. You can run a generator directly off of this. You can run a Coleman mantle directly off of this. Infact I have a video on youtube, which I will put a link up to it on Solar1234.com, that will say Coleman mantle running off of gas. I just hooked it up to a pipe and ran some gas to it and it lights up and you can see it. The system runs 24/7 if you feed it daily and take your fertilizer out. Or you can run it in a batch mode, where you load up a 55 gallon drum full of it. You wait about three days for it to start producing gas. They you can get gas out of it for about three weeks. They you empty it and start it over again or you run multiple batches.
<36:50>
Jack Spirko: Sure.
<36:51>
Steven Harris: It works really good. It produces a good, clean, and usable gas that is methane. You bi product is the most nitrogen rich fertilizers that you are going want. The waste surly, you til it into your garden and for your flowers. Jack, your show talks about greenhouses, growing, and square foot gardening.
<37:15>
Jack Spirko: If you are really enterprising, you might even make more than you can use and sell it to your neighbors.
<37:18>
Steven Harris: Absolutely. It works very good. The big problem with anaerobic digestion. It takes a lot of space. You are running 95% water to 5% dry matter because that is what it takes to make a slurry. If you take water and dirt and mix it up, to get a nice liquid consistency, that is what it is. It is 90% to 95% water and 5% dirt. The same thing will go with the leaves, sticks, and manure. You go a lot of water to make a slurry. And it needs to be kept warm. It really wants to be around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are in a colder climate, you can insulate it but you need to insulate it really well which a bunch of insulation, straw, ground up cellulose insulation, or foam. It produces heat when it digests. Which is good because it keeps itself warm but you have to really insulate it. This is really more of a warm climate type of thing in the southern part of the United States. I forget, this show is world wide. Hello people in New Zealand, Australia, and Russia listening to this show. It is amazing Jack. Your show goes around the world. It is more of a warmer climate thing. It works really well. It just takes up a lot of space. You have to have a continual source of manure, grass, lawn clipping, and other things to feed into this. If you were at a gulf course or something, you would have a continual source of material to feed into this and you might have the space.
<39:10>
Jack Spirko: Or if you kept cattle and horses. You go to do something with all the manure
<39:12>
Steven Harris: Or if you kept horse, goats, and chickens. Those are all fabulous sources. Remember for every 18 degrees Fahrenheit you increase in temperature or decrease in temperature you will double of half your bacteria activities. If you go from 70 degrees to 88 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature you will double you bacteria activity. It will digest twice as quick by going up 18 degrees Fahrenheit. You go up another 18 (degrees Fahrenheit) and it will double again. That is why if you get cold, like getting it down to 70 or 65 or 60, it is really going to slow down. Which will give you a lower output over a longer period of time. But then you need more of it to keep a usable amount of gas. This can be demonstrated in a little as a 5 gallon container for a science fair. I have had girl in Arizona that won first place in the high school science fair. She did this with two 5 gallon containers and dog poop and lawn clippings. She made the gas and ran it to a mantel and just wowed everyone. It can be done in as small as a 5 gallon containers, It is better done in a 55 gallon drum with a 30 gallon up ended into it. You take the 55 gallon drum and fill it up with the mixture. Then you put a 30 gallon drum upside down into it. What happens is as gas is produced it push the 30 gallon drum up. You have your hose connected at the end of the 30 gallon. The weight of the drum makes the pressure that you will need and that forces it out of the hose. If you need a more pressure you just put a brick on top of it.
<40:58>
Jack Spirko: Yeah.
<40:58>
Steven Harris: I have a book that shows how to do this, step by step. It is called "Biogas: Volumes 1 & 2." I will have it on the show notes on Solar1234.com. I also have a book called "Biogas 3: How the Chineese Make Biogas." This is how the Chinese do it. They do it in ground. They dig a pit and then they line with will bricks with cement and mortar, or with some type of line paste. You put a partition into it. You also have an inlet and an outlet so you can dump in 20 gallons of manure and compost a day on one side. You get 20 gallons of fertilizer being kicked out on the other side. This is a continuous plan. It will sit there and continuously make bio gas. This is book is called, "Biogas 3: How the Chineese Make Biogas." It will be in the show notes. In 1970 they had 40,000,000 of these in the country. They were really big. They were starting to make there own energy then and there are even more so now.
<41:02>
Jack Spirko: Of all the technologies you talk about this one of the most usable in my mind because you do not have to be technically smart how to do this. the inputs you need are widely available. For myself it solves two problems. One, it supplies energy. Whether is heat, light, or like you said you can run a generator with this stuff if you want to. The other thing it does is solves a waste issue. It takes a waste that would go to a landfill and turns it into fertility
<42:36>
Steven Harris: It gives you a fertilizer too.
<42:39>
Jack Spirko: Everybody that is out there composting could literally be doing this instead, instead of doing an aerobic compost like we traditionally do with our compost pile. You would do an anaerobic compost you would get a significantly less output as far as fertilizer, but very nitrogen dense fertilizer and very organic fertilizer as long as your inputs organic. If you are getting Roundup soaked gain that you are throwing in there, obviously you have that issue. Assuming you have good inputs you get great output. You get the heat energy as well. You could run 2 of your tank systems in a greenhouse and use it to heat the greenhouse through a winter.
<43:20>
Steven Harris: No. It wouldn't do it.
<43:22>
Jack Spirko: It depends where you are at, Steve. For you in Chicago probably not. For me, when I need supplemental heat for 40 days out of the year over night. I can do that easy, I would think.
<43:34>
Steven Harris: Right. A system that would provide a usable amount of power to a house in terms of heat, light, and generator power, you are looking at about 1000 gallon cistern. It is in "Biogas 3: How the Chineese Make Biogas."
<43:53>
Jack Spirko: Maybe 3 to 4 IBC totes done in a rotational pattern? You could do that as well.
<43:59>
Steven Harris: Absolutely. You can get a 300 gallon chemical tote for under $100 easily.
<44:07>
Jack Spirko: That is a lot less than a solar panel.
<44:09>
Steven Harris: Yeah, a lot less than a solar panel. You might have to be feeding this 50 to 100 pounds of material a day. That is a general rule of thumb. "Biogas: Volumes 1 & 2," "Biogas 3: How the Chineese Make Biogas," and I also have the "HandBook of Home Made Power" available on my website. That covers biogas really well. That will be at Solar1234.com. There you go, there is the ins and outs of biogas.
<44:44>
Jack Spirko: Before we move on to gasification one quick thing i want to add. In your notes you noted that, the smaller the material is that goes into tank the better. The Urban Farming Guys that are in Saint Louis, they get all of this throw way fruit that they use to make there biogas. All they did was go to Home Depot, and they got it at cost because because they told them what they are doing and they put them at YouTube. They just bought a garbage disposal. They plug the disposal into the electrical outlet, put the disposal on the top of the tank, and they shove the stuff in there, and when they are done they remove it and rinse it out. They put it away and do it again the next time they get more stuff.
<45:21>
Steven Harris: That is the way to do it.
<45:22>
