Yesterday, TED posted my talk about R&D-I-Y on the main TED.com site. This has driven a lot of traffic to the community and generated a lot of excitement around R&D-I-Y.

I’d like to

1) revisit the motivations for the larger R&D-I-Y context behind the Windowfarms project,
2) share my vision for the new directions,
3) celebrate a recent victory,
4) start a conversation about the culture in our community

Motivations for R&D-I-Y

The motivation behind R&D-I-Y is to improve both our global human relationship with the environment & our increasingly urban quality of life, by mobilizing those of us who would normally be dubbed “consumers” into a network of producers-for-the-planet.

We are not the decision makers in government, or the R&D firms in lab coats of big companies implementing government contracts. We do not have big budgets to allocate to projects, but we don’t have to guess at “what consumers want” and risk millions/billions on plans that take far too long to implement.

Our advantage is that we know what we want and we are the folks on the ground who will make it spread to the like-minded. We are not focusing on political channels to bring the change we want to see. We are acting to make our world what we want it to become.

A recent article points to why group-dynamics of communities like ours could impact “tragedies of the commons” like climate change at the large scale.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/group-dynamics-key-to-avoiding-tragedy-of-the-commons.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

Vision for New Directions

I have many friends leading opensource projects. I have seen that over time, creating a diverse community of people who have a longevity to their passion is critical (Drupal has seen challenges here).

My primary focus is on creating a diversity of ways to participate. This cannot only be a community for people with the same specific set of skills or we will all begin to flock to the same areas of work and lose ourselves in petty squabbles over miniscule details. We must be all sorts of people, working together on a broad set of endeavors.

My secondary focus is creating stability, both financially & legally for the project as well as for longevity of participants’ experience, so that it is more rewarding over time.

The work ahead involves a new product, repackaging the diy instructions’ media and doing a new diy release, and creatin a new website format to better facilitate the beautiful interactions we already have going on here.

Celebrating a Recent Victory

The community has produced its first design for Windowfarms that is truly a viable product and D-I-Y endeavor in a whole host of different designs.

The new windowfarms we are working to have produced will bring a diversity to our community, the capacity for financial & legal stability, and the possibility of a longevity of experience through increased reliability.

Your hard work testing, reporting, suggesting as well as supporting the project financially on Kickstarter (we hit and exceeded targets for both campaigns) has helped birth a new kind of organization.

We are anticipating that some new legal entity forms will soon be signed into law and we think they will provide a great financial and legal format for our collective endeavor.

Taking a step back to look at the culture we have created

What I see we have created is a kind of neighborly and empowering atmosphere.

Every newcomer is given the respect that he (or she) can do it himself. The rest of us are here to lend our experience where it is beneficial, but we generally have a positive attitude toward new experiments (we lean toward pure science). Because resources needed to pursue a new line of inquiry are not huge, we can happily encourage and jump on board with a new idea that seems to have legs. Failures and victories show up quickly and are increasingly more evident with each person’s repetition.

We also respect diversity of needs. There is no need for a one-size fits all solution. Everyone’s constraints are equally valid.

What other aspects of the community do you think should be drawn out and emphasized to newcomers? What should be downplayed? to keep the spirit of R&D-I-Y thriving as we grow?

In the meantime, please help me by being a leader in this community

Until we have a new framework for the website that will do more of this automatically, I could really use some help simply cleaning up what we have here.

Many posts get lost and newcomers do not find the like minds they came here to connect with mostly because very few people know how to use tagging, categories, and groups.

I find so many comments out on the web saying “windowfarms would be great if only they were (made of glass) or (did not require power), etc.” Our members have undertaken all of these endeavors and every one of these commentators is a potential new collaborator. We need to create channels that harness the excitement of new comers and thereby re-envigorate the long time windowfarmers with experience to make projects succede.

Please go into the comments for posts that you think are most interesting and ask the author to tag or categorize. Suggest tags that you think are the most common way of speaking to a subject.

Some people do not get the unique culture that makes R&D-I-Y thrive. It is a safe space in which to explore with support.

If you find someone who is saying something derogatory or that does not jive with our culture, please say something gently in the comments and ask them to change the language in their posts to be more welcoming to collaboration.

Also, if you are willing to take on more tasks, going in to tag and categorize other’s posts, please send an email to info[at]windowfarms.org.

Thank you all for making this project so inspiring every day.

-Britta

I don’t windowfarm (I have an outdoor garden and was just too busy this year to set anything up) but I have played with low pressure airlift for many years and I put up a few videos of how t-joints (outside your reservoir) might be a simple option for some people. I am just wondering if the team leaders have tried t-joints yet?
I am also wondering if the leadership of windowfarms would like to enter my airlift “contest”?
Details are at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKtB1YKoMxk Basically this is just an attempt to find the limits of the type of low pressure airlift that is used windowfarms. There is a HUGE misconception around that airlift pumps need to have submergence equal to the height pumped. (This is simply not true for the slug flow process that airlifts water in the windowfarms systems). My experience with slug flow goes back to 1983!
I got to 13 ft high with just 2.5 ft of submergence and someone else got to 16 ft. Problem for both of us was we didn’t have enough height at our homes to test going higher! Maybe 20 ft is attainable, maybe 40 ft. We simply do not know!
I acknowledge that this is almost like “pure” research. There is no immediate benefit to the windowfarms project. However, if after crunching your numbers, it were of use in 3rd world countries to pump water from wells, it could really put your project on the map! In any case, this type of airlift is really poorly understood and really poorly communicated to the public. So maybe doing the experiment would directly benefit your project after all. I suspect that someone with an apartment and fire escape has access to lots more than 16 ft of height and can test the true limits of slug flow airlift pumps. Thanks
Brian

Hello Everyone!

We’re working through some ideas on how to make the site more helpful.  We have some ideas about how to make information more accessible, which we hope will make it more useful and easier to learn from other people’s experience.

We’ll be continuing to roll out ideas for testing and we hope the community will comment and provide their thoughts and input so we can figure out what would be valuable for everyone.

Here’s one direction for a series of “posts” and uploaded images.  What questions would you want asked and answered initially vs. in the comments/response section so that troubleshooting would become more beneficial?  What would a helpful response look like?  What do you think is missing currently?  We’d love your input!

Any idea : )
?
thanks in advance !

We need to hear from you. Our windowfarm community has been a huge success and we want to make it even better. Your contribution to this survey will have a huge impact on the future of this community. Please take the 10 minutes to fill out the survey and as always thank you so much!

Take the survey and enter your username at the top.

-Britta

I made another video and basically I ran out of pipe and ladder and because of that I couldn’t pump any higher but I am curious. How high can you go? I went 13 ft but there was no problem whatsoever pumping that high! So, maybe, if you have a 2 story house or an available high place you could find out how high it is possible to go? So the contest rules are in the picture below and in a video
(You might get some extra hints and ideas if you watch the video)
Basically you use your aquarium air pump, and a T joint set at 2 ft below your liquid reservoir height.

Contest rules for unbelievably high airlift powered by puny aquarium air pump

So the rest of the post is from a couple of days ago and has a little different version of the video. (I am too Lazy to write a new post)

I made a new video about the pulser pump and Eileen suggested that a “pulser pump nano” (a smaller version) might be useful. The pulser pump is my little “invention” from over 20 years ago. Anyway, I no longer live near a river so I cannot do a nano. But because of my involvement in windowfarms, I can at least test how high a tiny pulser pump can pump. Today I used the T-joint method and an extendable ladder to go pretty high. With an aquarium air pump and 22 inches of submergence, I pumped to 13 ft high today! I bet it can go a lot higher but thats it for me.
Here is the video (which may be of some use to windowfarmers)

I did a little video today about lowering the airspeed through to windowfarm to vary (and sometimes increase!) the rate of airlift.  Depending on your tubes the rate can be quite slow and still give you good pumping. Check it out because I think it can help people to understand a bit better and to get things right first time.
Anyway here are some pictures that I took out of the video.

2 outlet air flow regulator valve

This is a little aquarium valve and bottom pic shows the adjustment knobs

You can either use it to regulate air to 2 t joints or just leave one open to the windowfarm and have the other one just a bit open to let some of the air escape.

Below is a head for connecting a tube under the reservoir. You might need a bit of gauze or window bug screen in the bottom to stop crud getting into the tubes.

Head for watering plants. Snip off the top and use the "neck" to attach tube

And you also can use this thing for aquariums as a bottom reservoir.

Aquarium attachment for tubing

And finally I am going to show you a pic of the bubble in the tubing.

plug of water

If you reduce the airflow into the t-joint and into the tube, sometimes the water flow increases. This is because the type of flow changes from churn flow to plug flow.

Plug flow can be quite slow sometimes. As the plugs of water rise, it changes from many short ones to a few long ones.

Watch the video to get more information.

Thanks Brian

I made a few of these a couple of years ago for solar cooker projects. (See picture at the bottom)   If you make one, just note that there are many different clocks on the market and some are stronger than others. Many are very weak so be careful when you do your “clock conversion”.

Also note that some sort of electronic device with a stepper motor could probably do the same thing better. (But I have not a clue about electronics so someone else must do that project). And the stepper thing could have linear motion. It does not need to be rotational. A stepper device could also have slower drip at night when the plants are sleeping.

Back to the clock!

Basically you just replace the hour hand of the clock with a little wheel. You wind string around the wheel and attach the string to a little tube. The tube provides the drip for your window farm. During the day as the wheel turns the tube lowers and water drips out.  At the end of the day, you loop the string round the wheel twice and refill your upper reservoir.   So for sure, you have a bit of work to do to adapt this for windowfarms but it would be fun and you could use a clock or maybe an electrical timer  to provide the rotation.  Useful especially for people who do not like the noise from pumps?

Anyways, I don’t think any solar cook ever used my clock based tracker, (Which is a huge shame) but the window farm people seem a lot more willing to experiment!

Get to it!!!

Clock based dripper

Thanks,  Brian.

This is an easily available attachment for pop bottles here in Canada. They are available in garden centers for watering plants.  This means the the entire windowfarm can be made from pop bottles and still get excellent airlift.

Your water tube would go down in a J shape to the t- joint to prevent back flow into the reservoir.

If you cut the “showerhead” top off, you can use an upturned pop bottle as your reservoir for a windowfarm and  attach the water pipe to a t-joint  outside  the bottle  and at whatever submergence you choose.  I think this can make life easier for everyone.

Plant watering attachment for pop bottles

The dripper tracker is a simple waterclock that I made to turn a solar cooker reflector.

It has 2 parts. A little float valve to control water height in a container and a pinhole or valve on a tube to control water speed out of the float container.

Basically if water height in the container is the same all day the drip maintains the same speed all day.  In my version I used a hydroponics emitter  on a float to block off the water flow.  Someone else might use something completely different to achieve the same effect.  My original top container was a 5 gallon paint bucket and the waterlevel valve was in a becel margerine container.

The drip valve was an air control valve for an aquarium air stone.

The range of speeds available is large.  I used to calculate speed by adjusting the drip valve and measuring the flow  into a cup.  You get it close to what you want. Then you raise or lower the drip valve  to “fine tune” the speed.

If people are interested, I can draw more complicated versions too.

(For instance, you could have a waterclock independent of your hydroponics and that way the drip will be more reliable.

Windowfarm dripper for constant drip speed