The website is up! Still very much a work in progress, but it's there. Let me know what you think...

http://solarflower.org/

Good lord, I have been terrible with keeping this blog up to date, I never even mentioned the first free construction workshop.

About ten people involved, three days to source materials and tools, six days to complete, NZ$110 total cost. Thanks to the Riverside community for hosting and making available the workspace. It was originally going to be taking place at the Tui community over in Golden Bay, but that fell apart at the last moment while I was attending the New Zealand national permaculture hui at Riverside, so I was luckily able to lash something together there on the fly. It actually turned out a stroke of luck, as trying to do all this over in Tui would've been a nightmare due to lack of access to people and resources.

So in case you haven't heard the festival trip has been cancelled due to lack of funds.
But fear not! The SolarFlower World Tour will still of course be happening, just now after the summer and not involving a vanload of hippies touring Europe's festivals all summer for free.
Oh well.

So what I'm doing instead, at least for the next couple of months is:
http://urbangreenhouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/announcing-paris-urban-farming.html

setting up an urban farming collective in Paris. Because why not.


So if you're around, let me know. We can build some greenhouses.

I may end up doing another construction workshop while I'm here, and definitely have to get the now infamous tutorials finally completed, but otherwise generally I'll be posting updates to the greenhouse blog until I get back into the solar, probably in Turkey round Octoberish(?)

IndieGoGo is go!

The crowdfunding project is now live, and can be found here: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-SolarFlower-World-Tour-Europe

The aim is to raise €2000 by the first of July to cover any and all costs of the festival trip. There will also be a €100 salary per participant, for the duration.

So just to sum up: if you want, you can join us touring a bunch of festivals and communities, building and supporting the Solarflower project and other interesting stuff, it will all be completely free, and you be paid for your time.

If you are psychologically capable of perceiving anything more awesome, or have something better to do with your time, I envy you.

An important note about the crowdfunding thing; if we don't reach the target I'll be making up any shortfall from the Solarflower kitty, which is my pocket. This is so that you can rest assured that this trip is definitely happening, regardless. (But doing so will eat in to my funds and probably cut short The Solarflower World Tour, after I leave Europe.)

SolarFlower is seeking collaborators for a free European festival roadtrip.

The SolarFlower is a free and open source solar device which tracks the sun during the day and collects energy in the form of heat, which can then be used to run various applications such as water heating and purification, electricity, cooking, biochar, biodiesel, etc.
It can be made from recycled materials and common household items using very basic tools and skills, and there will be detailed animated tutorials on how to construct and use the device and its applications.
Over the next few years I plan to travel with the project, working with local communities and NGOs, giving free workshops and working in with people on how to build and develop this technology and others.

More information at http://www.solarflower.blogspot.com/
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_184038684971498&ap=1
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166441523415416
First though I want to spend the summer touring festivals and eco-communities around Europe, and I need three people to join me, as well as a van or other transportation.

The plan is this:
~Touch down in Europe around mid June.
~Hold a free workshop constructing one or two of the device, as well as a basic shower unit.
~Load it all onto a trailer.
~Tour the whole thing around any festival that will offer us admission in exchange for free hot showers for their patrons and supporting the project.

What you need to bring:

Technical requirements:
None. If you can physically hold a hammer you are fully equipped to help construct the device.
Being able to drive would be helpful.

Financial requirements:

UPDATE:
We now have a crowd funding project through Indiegogo.com ( http://www.indiegogo.com/The-SolarFlower-World-Tour-Europe ) to pay for this whole trip, as well as a €100 salary per participant for the duration. If this goal is not met I'll be topping up the difference from the Solarflower travelling fund, ie my pocket.

So not only will all this cost you nothing, you'll actually be paid to do it.

Practical requirements:
Tent, sleeping bag, etc. Whatever you'd normally take on a roadtrip. One person will need to supply the van /station wagon /car. Preferably something comfortable with good mileage and that won't break down. You will need to make your own way to the initial meeting point, probably at this stage northern Germany.
Also, I'll be too busy to do the work of approaching festivals etc for free entry, so someone else(s) will need to take on this task.

Personal requirements:
Must be a nice, easy going person who likes roadtrips, festivals and summer. Prior experience with social / environmental / energy projects is not required.

What you need to do to apply:

Send an email to solarflower.org@gmail.com with some information about yourself and a quick basic video. I know self promotion is difficult, but so is trying to choose three people you haven't met to share the summer with.

Any and all finer details will be arranged by the group.

And please forward this on to anyone you think might be interested. There's now less than a month to arrange all this, so the more people I can reach the better.

Thanks,

Daniel.

Well, the main news is that the device now works and is happily tracking the sun as we speak. I still have to complete the reset mechanism and heat tank, but these are (touch wood) vastly less involved than the tracking system and collector and will be lashed together when I'm back in New Zealand next month. I'm aiming to give my first free workshop somewhere in Golden Bay, maybe around the end of April.

Video evidence!!



Should point out that the wobbliness is not due to tracking error; the gearing is currently set a bit looser than it needs to be, and the wind messes with it. Easily fixable.




In other news, the Facebook page is changing over to a group, and can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/home.php?sk=group_184038684971498&ap=1

Feel free to pop in.
Also, www.solarflower.org will hopefully be up and functional in the near future.

Wow, slack on the updates. The last pieces of the device are being put together now, I'll have media once there's something interesting to photograph.

This is a design I sort of threw together one afternoon thinking about the absolute easiest and cheapest way to make a greenhouse, ideally for farming in cities and favella type environments.

It's just three tripods together in a triangle, wrapped in some ultra cheap plastic such as transparent mulch film, which some farmers throw literally kilometres of away each year.


It's arbitrarily scalable, the one pictured would have a 110 m2 footprint, giving about 320 m2 growing area. It'd also tie in well with aquaponics and similar.

I'll have a look at getting a working group together here in Perth, leave most of the work with them while I get on with the solar thing.

It'll largely come down to what land can be found, but as the thing will be somewhat moveable, getting kicked out won't be such a big issue.

Updates on this will appear on http://urbangreenhouse.blogspot.com/

A few components still missing and a bit hacked together, but pretty much working.

Cute, no?

Unnecessary distractions 2: The Spoon Fork.

In Malaga my wallet was stolen at a market where I was wanting to, interestingly, buy a new wallet. (But then couldn't because I no longer had any money).

They made off with €50 and a couple of cards, but what I missed the most was a little folding plastic spoon I'd got with an icecream in Australia.

How one is meant to travel without a spoon remains unclear.

So, finally, I got around to making myself a replacement. Hence:

the spoon fork.


(Not a spork!)

Unnecessary distractions 1: The Solar Shower.

There were a couple of reasons for building a solar powered shower at the Traumschule when I showed up for the skill sharing camp in March; it'd been something I'd wanted to learn for a while, the only existing shower they had was a cold hose in the basement, and it was the north of Germany, in March.
Generally if the only way to get clean involves water slightly above freezing, I just won't get clean. The other people there didn't seem to mind too much, but Germans, like Scandinavians, are insane.

Most of what you see here was built in about two weeks, but wasn't actually finished until October, and not by me. I had an epic struggle with first the bends for the copper tubing (below) and then the water tank, which simply would not stop exploding, often spectacularly.

(I wasn't aware the water pressure was 5 bar, or twice that of a car tyre. That kind of psi simply will not be contained.)

In the end we went with a non-pressurised system using a toilet cistern. It worked pretty good and we still got a good rate of flow from the shower head.

It all works off a simple thermosyphon principle, where the water circulates itself through the heating panel due to the fact that hot things rise.


The actual metal panel we ended up using was donated to us, but not before I'd spent longer than intended trying to make this one. We had a bunch of old copper pipe, but I had massive problems joining it together.

The proper way is to get copper elbows and solder the whole thing, but we didn't have the money or soldering setup for that, so I had to try to make do with plastic hose, which kept going soft and collapsing when it got hot.













Finally the solution was to use two types of hose, one inside that other. The outer hose is the right diameter to fit snugly over the copper, with ridged washing machine hose inside to keep it strong and evenly curved.
However, shortly after coming to this I decided I really had to get back to the solarflower, and then we were donated the other panel anyway, so it never got finished.

But it's a good way of doing it.

Then a month later we discovered a full industrial grade water heating panel just laying around in the basement which made all of this unnecessary in the first place.