The Greening of Gavin

Our New Outdoor Kitchen – Reuse Extraordinaire!

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To complement our outdoor clay oven area, we decided to use some of the space near it into an outdoor kitchen.

We had a builder friend build the actual cabinet and seating out of pine and an eco pine cladding.  As you can see, the cabinet doors have not been fitted yet, but he is fitting them this weekend.  This job is a little beyond my DIY skills.

We have a second hand stainless steel sink to be fitted, and a two burner stove top that will be installed at the other end of the bench, which in the future will be able to be converted to biogas.

Out of shot to the right of the picture is the Clay Oven, which completes this kitchen.

Anyway, another interior designer friend gave Kim two boxes of Caesarstone samples, which were tile-shaped, so we decided to tile the bench using this material that was otherwise destined for landfill if we did not save it.

It came up pretty well, we think.  After a quick grout, it looks fantastic.  Even our builder friend said it was a great example of reuse.

Now for the seating.  Kim wanted the pipes from the laundry covered up, but I had one condition.  That it be done in such a way that I could connect a grey water hose externally.  She said that the hose had to be hidden as well.  Okay then.  
Can’t see it now.  We painted the box seat with outdoor woodland grey that we had leftover from another job.
I found a rather large hose, which was a spare from the swimming pool, and we connected up a drain diverter.  The diverter is a simple knob that diverts the flow of grey water from the drain to the hose.  The hose is long enough to reach most trees in the front fruit orchard which is a great bonus. 

There is the hose and the diverter in the box.  Very easy to fit.

And with the little door closed, you would never know it was there.  Who said that being green had be unaesthetic?  
So that is where we are up to.  Once the doors are fitted the large cabinet, we will give them a lick of paint. We have a plumber coming in the next few weeks to connect the sink and the gas top.  
I will be glad when it is all finished.  Just in time for the spring weather.  Looking forward to a cooked breakfast of fresh eggs collected no more than four meters away and prepared outside.  This kitchen will also be a great area to prepare food for Clay Oven parties.
It feel great to have given a second life to lots of items in this build.  Have you reused anything major lately?

Methane

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Hot off the tail of my Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome review, I have been giving the methane issue a lot of thought since the weekend.  As I have probably mentioned before, Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of 25.  That means that it is 25 times more potent than Carbon dioxide (CO2) and is a massive contributor to climate change.

Now, we humans use methane all the time, although it is not labelled as such.  Natural gas is mainly methane, and this fossil fuel is used in most capital cities in Australia and indeed throughout the world.  We cook with it, heat our homes, manufacture fabrics, glass, steel, plastics, paint, fertiliser, and other products out of it.  Methane is also off gassed from sewage, swamps, manure, compost, worm farms, rotting vegetable matter, and decomposing animals.  It is all around us naturally as well.

When burnt it converts to CO2, and water vapour therefore reducing its greenhouse potential and serving a useful purpose.  However, by extracting the fossil fuel type natural gas, we are adding million year old stored carbon into the atmosphere and upsetting the normal carbon cycle, not to mention that we are quickly running out of natural gas in some parts of the world.  Peak Natural gas, one might say.  Certainly North America is very close, and Europe (except Russia) peaked years ago.

What if there was a better and greener way of getting our energy needs, one that was available to most of us, right under our noses and did not upset the carbon cycle?  Well, I reckon that there is.  It is Natural Biogas, and it is very easy to make at home.  All you have to build is a Methane digester.  So what is a Methane digester?  A Methane digester is a device used to capture methane from an organic slurry that is processed anaerobically (without oxygen), and could be used for everything that we use natural gas for today.  Have a look at the picture below to see how it works. 

I certainly have plenty of chicken manure and vegetable matter around the place, in fact I have so much chook poo that I have no room left in the compost bins, and have had to bag it up for future use in the garden.  India, some African and South American nations are using this technology in a big way to make biogas for villages.  This reduces the villagers dependence on wood for cooking and heating, and therefore preventing deforestation.  Yet another win for the environment!

So, hypothetically speaking (you can see where this is going by now), if I were to build a Methane digester, and produce a decent supply of methane, what could I use it for?  I could, if I chose to build one, convert a petrol generator and make electricity to run my pool pump.  I could use it to cook on my BBQ and never have to buy Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) ever again which would save me about $80 a year in LPG.  I could buy a compressor and store the methane into LPG bottles for future use.  If I was really good, I could buy an old LPG converted car and run it off of methane.  I could use it to heat our hot water when the sun is not shining.  The practical uses are endless.  Wherever you use natural gas and LPG today, you could substitute this all with natural biogas.

Check this guy out.  He made a simple digester out of two plastic barrels, for next to nothing.

The design could be as simple as this;

Or as complex as this;

Sounds like a very cool next project.  How good would it be to be independent of the natural gas grid.  Just think, no more gas bills!  Let me mull over it for a while and attempt to convince Kim that it is a good idea, and we will see what comes of it.  What do you think?

Who would like to come to my place for a biogas BBQ this summer?