Intermediate technologies

The following email from Matt Dunwell at Ragman’s Lane Farm in Gloucestershire came shortly after the ‘Great Freeze’ of winter 2009/2010. It offers a powerful insight into the issue at the heart of this ingredient:

“I have the exquisite pain of no heating at the farm, having installed a biomass system with a titanic budget, which has decided to break just as we start our three-month residential permaculture course. It’s very expensive kit but suppliers and installers are still feeling their way, and there are loads of teething problems. It will take a good few years of mugs like me to pioneer these systems before they are safe to be let loose on an unsuspecting public.

Hey ho. Now it has been bust for ten days (first they thought it was the electric motor on the flue (£400), now they think it’s the circuit board that controls the whole boiler (£800), and the pipework that is meant to be super-insulated to carry hot water to outlying buildings has frozen solid. We have finally got the boiler working, but are now faced with the task of thawing super insulated pipes that have frozen whilst the ambient temperature slips to -15°C. Every now and again we tow another student on to the farm with a tractor that is running with no cooling system, as the antifreeze froze in the tractor engine and frayed the fan belt as it passed over the water pump, which makes me want to hit it with a broom. Meanwhile the entire shower block has frozen solid, promising all sorts of water sports when the terrifying halogen heaters that we have hired start making an impact.

How precarious it all is. I had the strange experience of passing the engineer for the boiler whilst I was servicing Reinhart’s Ceramic Stove, the only thing that is presently providing heat for the whole course. I dug a bucket of clay from the pond and mixed it with a bit of sharp sand. I had the chimney off, swept and replaced in about 20 minutes. He was standing over a box of capacitors, probes, and electric spare parts, on the phone to the wholesaler in Lincoln, who was trying to source parts from Austria while the airports were closing down all around.”

Creating a Transition infrastructure of urban agriculture, community-owned energy generation, low-carbon transport and so on will require hard thinking about what technologies to use. As a principle, we might look first at locally made equipment or ensure at least that it can be repaired locally and parts are fairly easy to obtain.

The image above shows a cob greenhouse, built as part of a commercial market garden at the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in West Cork in Ireland. It is made using onsite subsoil mixed with local straw and sculpted to produce the walls. The walls are attractive, store heat from the sun and re-radiate it slowly back into the space.

Much of the glass is recycled and easily replaced. Its owners understand how it was built and how to repair it. This is a different proposition from a kit greenhouse imported from overseas, with complex heating and cooling systems and reliant on regular maintenance and imported replacement parts.