Earth, Water, Wind, Fire in the Hole

In addition to building a model village to demonstrate the strength and attractiveness of the 90% earth building method, we are constantly exploring and experimenting with new ideas for possible application to the villages in Darfur.

One of the things I came across about a year ago was the PlayPump system.

It is such a great idea. It is in essence a merry-go-round / water pump. It has been an incredible success in the southern African countries where is has been used so far. For example, at schools, teachers would often come at four or five in the morning to get water from a well or use a hand pump for the children to use during the day. Now, the kids can play on the PlayPump and fill up the water storage tank. The system goes deeper than a normal well allowing access to cleaner water and pumps 10 times faster than a hand pump. The company that sets the system up is in South Africa, but I am working on getting a system started up at our model village at La Sierra University and hopefully the real villages in Darfur very soon. Check out the interactive card below. For some reason, you can only view it using Internet explorer and sometimes you have to refresh the page (hit F5) if it stops loading, but give it a try.



Once we finish our first few test domes, we may build the complete eco-dome with all the things included in a modern home. We are looking at testing out a new windmill power system design at our model village. Each one will provide about a megawatt of power per day.

We may actually make full use of a PlayPump system for some small-scale agricultural testing. La Sierra University gave us a pretty large piece of land to work with, so we can now try out many new ideas. We are looking at using the area you can see in front of Arbee who is operating the cement mixer in the photo. Just imagine what this photo will look like with the completed village and colorful plants and flowers. I'm actually heading out to Hawaii in a few hours. I'll be meeting with some groups about ideas for agriculture at Fire in the Hole (our village).

The Cal-Earth Institute has come up with great ideas in their experience with this building method. Building upon strengths, using what you have to work with, these concepts have been life changing. Seemingly useless things suddenly have incredible uses, useful things have even more potential uses. For example, following Cal-Earth, we use a simple dog leash stake connected to a chain to serve as a compass to show us how much to come in on each layer to form the correct dome shape with engineering precision. We also use simple pvc pipe as forms for the windows. We just lay a line of filled bag over the pipe and knock the pipe out after we finish a few layers on top of it.