And my water butts are nearly empty. I rain water harvest from the shed and from the shanty town style extension next door, but even this is doing little good. I may have to break into the down pipe from the bath & divert this to the water but. Hmm, not sure my landlord would like it. The strawberries are very bedraggled – which reminds me! I need to get in contact with Dick Strawbridge about that glass exploding machine on ‘it’s not easy being green.’

So, tasks for today:

1. Do not get distracted by KEEP. Though this is very exciting, other KEEP volunteers need to do stuff. DONE – though water harvesting distraction instead.
2. Contact Dick Strawbridge re glass machine (used for their heat store glass in their greenhouse). DONE
3. Contact Paul Early from Living Roofs DONE
4. Draw up rough PID (process diagram) (started!)
5. Contact Pilkingtons about 6 by 6 glass manufacture? DONE – 2 by 6 maybe better
6. Get dressed – a low priority for home workers unless we have meetings to go to – we are the slipper clad army. DONE
7. Email to Chris Shirley-Smith DONE

Houseshare mystery 1: why is there an earring down the toilet? How long will it stay there?

Found Dick Strawbridge site on my google desktop search, www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.org, now they’ve published a book and this is referenced everywhere, it was really difficult to track them down on normal google.

One night my dad phoned to tell me there was something interesting on TV – ‘it’s not easy being green’. I watched their programme about building a water wheel, and decided that I could probably do something like that at Novy Mlyn – which literally means New Mill and I’m sure had a water wheel at some point in the past. So, after watching ‘it’s not easy being green’ I went searching for a generator online & came up with Futurenergy – who were also looking for distributors. I decided at that point that I needed to do something, personally, to tackle climate change, alongside my work with families of children with specific needs. My initial thought was to put together an education pack for schools & help community groups apply for funding to put in their own wind turbine. I met up with Richard Osbourne at EFX/Futurenergy, as well as Terry Martin – from Birmingham Education.

What I discovered was that though it would be an interesting project, and it would be fantastic to have wind turbines on schools and community centres across the country, there was a problem. This is that schools are currently inundated with ‘new projects’ and unless you have an environmental champion within a school, it is difficult to get in. In February I’d secured some funding for inclusive play schemes, exactly because of this. Head teachers had been sent letters saying ‘we will give you 5k to spend on a week long playscheme’, but were so overworked the message hadn’t physically reached them. Now if you can’t give away money to schools because the heads are too stressed, my eco education project probably wouldn’t work quickly.

It did, at least, prompt me to change course. To think seriously about what I can do to combat climate change. So, thanks Dick & family.

Right, so I’ve emailed Dick and phoned Paul Early. Paul was a mine of information – he even has the name of someone who makes roof based green filtration systems http://www.wwuk.co.uk/ chris shirley-smith. We talked about schmutzdecke, glastonbury, the association of environmentally conscious builders aecb.net and more. Hopefully we can meet up for a drink next time he’s in Birmingham. I’ll invite him to birmingham green drinks (no word yet from green drinks international about putting Birmingham on the greendrinks.org site).

Just spoken to Chris Shirley-Smith. Their system looks like it would fit perfectly with bog. And the cost is a lot lower than what I’d spec’d. Need to send him an email about the project. p.s there’s a place called Shirley up the road from here, and the chinese restaurant there used to be called the Shirley Temple. Chris’s product GROW http://www.wwuk.co.uk/grow.htm looks great, and it’s already out there, so I can inform the skeptics that, as I’ve said before, I am only using ready proven technology.
Spoken to a few people at Pilkington. Gary Smith was very helpful & pointed out that glass may not like being in such large sheets. Therefore I could amend the storage tank design so 3 interconnected units of 1800×600. Surely, though, if they were interconnected, it would make no difference to the water pressure on the glass? Hmm. Could do with some advice. Also, what will be best material for the frames? They’ll be 100-200mm, and need to be strong enough to carry the glass & water, & provide a way of attaching the unit to a wall. Maybe in the first instance we need to construct these in another substance – such as the carpet burns product. We could let potential customers know that art glass can be used in the water storage units. It would be great if I could find a glass artist to do some demo’s.
As I couldn’t find a recycled card business card on vista print, I’ve ordered a stamp with my company details – so I’ll recycle my own paper, make it into card and then use these as business cards. How green is that. Already the envelopes from patent office letters have put a nice, blue tinge on the paper I made last night. Just had another through from the patent office confirming they now have my nice, un hand drawn logo, and can process that.

Was just testing the paper I made last night… seems fine and will make good business cards, however have to wait for 21 days for stamp to arrive. After I’ve had a shower, I’m going to start on the PID (Process Instrumentation Diagram). I’m going to use the paper I made & stitch it together into the PID. That’ll give the engineers from Mars a shock.

PID – I seem to be using delaying tactics. I’ve just had a shower, set up a grey water saving system to divert shower water to the strawberries. Think I now need a cup of tea… or even lunch as I’m hungry after all that work moving water butts around and sawing up drainpipes… now just need to encourage flatmates to take lots of showers today. Houseshare mystery 2 – the shower holder has broken. Now have broken shower holder, shower curtain, bathroom door lock and toilet handle. We appear to be haunted by a bathroom fixated spirit of some sort.
Maybe little Helen can help me with a PID? She’s coming round tonight to make paper, but she’s doing an MBA in transport which is very maths heavy, so she might be able to help me with a piddly little PID for a toilet/reed bed system?

http://www.mencap.org.uk/html/campaigns/changingplaces.asp Rachel Hughes is in charge of the ‘changing places, changing lives’ campaign & she recommended that I contact the Disabled Living Foundation to find out about cost effective changing tables.

Disabled Living Foundation Bob is sending me through information about changing tables via email. And he did immediately. Now having a look at shower stretchers/changing tables: http://www.freewayonline.co.uk/sb.asp?sid=77 seem cost effective.

http://www.met-office.gov.uk/climate/uk/averages/19712000/rr/17.gif just looking up average rainfall for my PID – that’ll be 1125 mm per year, but varying wildly between say, the South East and North Wales. So Birmingham, for example – closest weather station stratford on avon – would be 1379.2mm annually. If bog has roof extensions of 1.5m wide on all 4 sides – 17m x1.5 that’ll give me 25.5 m2 collection area, so if there were such a thing as an average week in weather, we’d gather 1379.2/52 = 26.38mm x ? mm2. Could this be 672.8 litres of water per week from a 25.5 m2 collection area? Help! my maths is rubbish. If anyone reading this could double check the maths & email me on nic at 500 year vision dot com, I’d be really grateful.

I know that the sun-mar unit has a one pint flush. Wonder how much water is used in the average shower? Okay, so a power shower will use 125 litres in 5 mins, so we’ll not be using those. Average showers= 12 litres per minute. (I guess that’s good news for my strawberries if nothing else). So a nice, 15 min shower with hair wash, condition & cleaning my teeth will probably use 180 litres of water. If these figures are right, that would mean that a single shower would fill my 180 litre rain barrel. And empty it.

The water storage containers were going to be 1.8m x 1.8 m by 20 cm, say. Which would give me 32400 x 20 cubic cm – l litre = 1000 cubic cms – 648 litres per unit. ARGH MATHS! In laymens terms if I got 65 cartons of orange, lined 10 up and stacked 5 or 6 on top. Then my maths is going wrong somewhere. Am I missing a decimal place somewhere?

So within the 6m by 2.5 m shipping container, we could fit 3 water storage units on each of the long walls, and one in a dividing wall. We could also fit them in the roof area as we have quite a lot of head spaces going spare in the container. So, with ease we could store 648 litres x 6. Giving us 3888 litres of water, which, if the unit was in Birmingham, would take 5 to 6 weeks to fill up if the bog was not adjoining an existing building and harvesting rainwater from this. Once done, this water would provide for just 21.6 nice, 15 min showers. A single water storage device of 648 litres would provide 3.6 long showers, and would fill up on average, in Birmingham, in just under a week. Okay, so that means that it’s fairly easy to calculate household requirements. With the bog standard 648 litre unit, you could have a 7 min shower every day, or a 15 min shower every other day, with water left over to flush the loo. As an amendment to existing bathrooms, the bog standard unit could provide 32 odd x 20 litre flushes or 64 x 10 litre flushes from the water used in a fifteen minute shower every other day. If the average person uses the loo 5 times a day, one bog standard unit per person should be plenty.

So we need 25 square metres collection space for each person in a domestic environment. How big is the average roof? 50 square metres for a small house – 81 square metres for a 6 bedroom place. So, in cases where there were a lot of people sharing a house, we’d still need a higher initial water input, but output would be reduced significantly.
Okay, so… the version of the product which we sell to camp sites and lease to festivals could go as far as having an additional shipping container layer on top of the bathroom unit specifically to hold water for showers. How on earth did it get to 7pm?

Now, I’ll have a look at how much water can be processed through a green roof/reed bed filtration system.