Welcome Norgay!

Konchok Norgay recently arrived here at Yestermorrow all the way from Ladakh, a Himalayan region of north India. Norgay has long worked as a teacher, and most recently as executive director, of SECMOL, an innovative school that has pioneered passive solar building and renewable energy education in Ladakh.

Konchok Norgay arrives at Yestermorrow

Norgay will be a student in the Natural BuildingCertificate Program this summer, and hopes to gain a deeper exposure to best practices in renewable energy, natural building, and sustainability education. This fall he will return to Ladakh and continue teaching practical skills and systems thinking to Ladakhi youth and builders. He is also working to create social enterprises building energy efficient earthen homes and local foods across Ladakh.

If you see Norgay around campus, please come say "Jullay!" (hello in Ladakhi) - and if you'd like to support Norgay's participation in the Natural Building Certificate Program this summer, please consider donating to his scholarship fund.

DIY Alternative Hot Water System

Our first-ever DIY Alternative Hot Water System class was a success, building a "Jean Pain Mound" in nearby Fayston out of woodchips which will passively heat domestic hot water for a family for the next 18-24 months.

The French farmer/inventor Jean Pain became famous for his innovative ideas about the interrelationship between agriculture and energy production. One of his concepts, the Pain Mound, focused on the use of woody biomass as an effective compost material while collecting heat from the composting process.

This prototype mound will produce 110-degree water at a constant rate of ½-gallon per minute, by flowing well water through the coil built into the mound of composting wood-chips and mulch. This temperature-gain and flow-rate represents enough btu-value to heat a typical 1000-square foot home with a radiant floor heating system.

Participants built the mound (with assistance from a small excavator) by spreading 8 inch-thick layers of mulch over water-line coils and thoroughly soaking each layer with water. Students also learned about the history of Jean Pain via excerpts from his writings and a documentary film.

For more information about this system, please visit http://mrvenergy.org/index.php?title=Jean_Pain_Method_Demonstration_Project which includes links to the documentary film and other resources.

Here's the class on top of the completed mound.

Thinking About Energy

This week has brought a flurry of thought to Yestermorrow about energy. On Tuesday I attended the monthly meeting of the LocalVolts- the energy subcommittee of the Valley Futures Network. One of the volunteers unveiled the Mad River Valley Energy Wiki- an amazingly information-filled resource about energy-related projects happening around here. There are folks looking at biomass- how much wood could we sustainably harvest from within the valley, and how would we distribute it; others are looking at energy conservation and weatherization; still more are interested in barn-raising type events to help homeowners install solar hot water and photovoltaics. Pretty neat!

On Thursday I was lucky enough to tag along with the Farm Design class for the morning on a field trip to see Gaelan and Jasna Brown's experimental woodchip water heater affectionately nicknamed "the brown mound". Based on what's called the "Jean Pain Method" they have created a large packed pile of wet woodchips with a coil of 1" water pipe in the middle which preheats the water coming out of their well before it goes into their hot water heater. So far he's been getting water out at 120 degrees F. In addition to domestic hot water, they're hoping eventually they could use it for space heating as well. Gaelan has been blogging and documenting the whole process in order to help spread the word about this fascinating low-tech system- check it out!

Back at Yestermorrow everyone was buzzing over lunch about how we might get involved here at the school. One possibility is to run a workshop with Gaelan next summer and create a woodchip pile for the Chalet's hot water. While the current focus on campus is getting our solar hot water system and PV array installed this winter, we also started talking about how we could transition to solid fuels for heating our main building (right now we have high efficiency propane boilers). That's a bigger project, obviously, but one worth starting to think about as we plan our campus expansion. On November 23rd from 7-9 pm we'll host a free Button Up Vermont workshop for the local community to learn about energy conservation and money saving techniques to weatherize your home. The interns have been tackling the Chalet (certainly a weatherization challenge) and already it's more comfortable and better equipped for the dropping temperatures to come, and we've started replacing our 30-year old donated refrigerators with new Energy Star rated models, amongst other energy efficiency improvements.

Yestermorrow goes solar

After years of dreaming about how we could produce more of our own energy, we're thrilled to be implementing two major renewable energy projects on the Yestermorrow campus.

In September we learned we'd been awarded one of the Vermont Community Climate Change Grants to install a solar hot water system for our domestic hot water use (kitchen, showers, etc). We've received $11,850 from the state for this project, and are partnering with GroSolar to design the system which we hope to install in the next couple of months. It will include 6 flat plate collectors mounted on the east side of the roof of the main building and a couple hundred gallons of super insulated storage tanks in the basement. In addition to lessening our fossil fuel consumption (we currently use propane to heat our hot water), we are also hoping this project will provide an educational demonstration site for people interested in learning more about solar hot water systems. We'll have informative signage on all the equipment and will run a solar hot water workshop in conjunction with the installation, so stay tuned for more details on that learning opportunity.

On Friday we also signed an agreement with Earth Turbines in Williston, VT to install a 32kW photovoltaic array at Yestermorrow. This installation through their All Sun Trackers lease program allows us to purchase the solar energy produced by the PV panels through net metering via a 5-year lease. The 32kW installation is expected to generate close to 45,000 kWh of electricity per year- enough to cover Yestermorrow's annual electricity consumption for the entire campus. The panels are what's known as "solar trackers"- ground mounted panels which move with the sun across the sky to maximize the amount of energy they create. We're currently in the process of finalizing the tracker locations, permitting and obtaining a certificate of public good from the state of VT, but if all goes well we'll have the panels installed by the end of the year.

We'll be documenting both projects extensively and posting photos to the blog as we move forward.