I would love to direct anyone within NESEA’s resources to help with the following email I just received:
…Georganne Greene and I took a group to Nicaragua in February and built an earthbag house (I’ll send you a link to the video we made about it). It was an amazing experience! We’re going back in June, but know we can’t build an earthbag house during the rainy season, so we’re exploring rainy season projects. The project we’re most interested in is building justa stoves, to reduce air pollution from smoke in general and the impact of breathing smoke on the families we’re working with specifically, as well as to reduce the amount of wood that needs to be used in cooking.
As a change of pace from our last project, we thought if we actually built one of these stoves with someone with experience at it before we left, we’d be better prepared when we got there. We’ve found materials online about how to build these stoves and information about people who are building these stoves in other parts of the country or the world, but haven’t found anyone in New England. Could you reach out to your contacts to see if anyone knows of someone that could help us out?
The other project we’d really like to work on is building composting toilets, to reduce the amount of raw sewage going into Lake Nicaragua. We haven’t been able to find a good model for this–the two options we’ve found are buying composting toilets or creating one that’s basically building a wooden box around a 10 gallon bucket. We can’t afford the former and don’t think the latter would be acceptable to the population. If you know of anyone who has developed a good model for this, that would be really exciting.
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Julie
Thanks for your help!
Marc
Marc Sternick, AIA, LEED AP
Vice President, Senior Project Architect
Dietz & Company Architects, Inc.
Try Mark Krawczyk, who teaches a class on how to build earth ovens at Yestermorrow. He may not personally have built a justa stove, but is likely to be connected to that community.
Additionally, you may want to look for experienced rocket stove builders. The tech is very similar, and there are probably more rocket stove builders around here. Matthew DeLorey in Williamstown, VT might be a good person to track down. He has produced a youtube video on the topic of rocket stoves.
As for the toilets – would a simpler bucket system using 5 gallon bucket (easier to carry and empty) be more acceptable to the populace? If not, the basic premise behind most composting toilets with a built-in composter is a chamber of some sort below the seat. The chamber either has a crank that turns the entire chamber (automatically closing the door through which the wastes enter the chamber, then re-opening it after a certain number of rotations) or a crank that turns a fork-like object within the chamber to turn the compost regularly. It’s not really different from the bucket in a wooden box, except that you have a larger chamber, so there’s room for the composting to happen in-place. Note: if this kind of composter is in a location that freezes, the consequences of using it while frozen are sufficient to make one wish for a bucket system. This is a lesson we learned the hard way.
Marc,
I’ve built a couple over the years, loosely based on the Clivus. Big and bulky, but seem to work ok. Be happy to share the details sometime.