Plans Afoot ... or Just Dreams?

What am I going to do when I next get out to Kenya? What dreams and plans are buzzing through my head?

With difficulty, I have to sort all that I want to do into an order of importance, so I suppose the top of the list (and potentially the most expensive) project is to complete and improve (or improve and complete?) the anaerobic digester so that we have a storage tank of methane that can be used for cooking. As the present anaerobic digester works well enough, it only needs a pressure regulated, safe storage tank to complete it.

When it works well, we can go commercial. I am sure that hotels and restaurants would welcome free cooking gas.

Next, I am in the process of designing a see-saw that will also act as a water pump. Why shouldn't kids have fun while they are pumping water up from the borehole?

I would like to build a barbecue at the Twiga Centre - I can smell the nyama choma already!

Other projects? Well, I want to try making a clay food cooler and a clay oven. All I need is a source for the clay.

Then, large scale organic waste recycling is on the list. The idea is to make compost from all the waste found at the markets and along the roadside where hawkers sell their wares. This can be sold to raise funds for other projects - well, that's the idea, anyway. The logistics are a little more complicated than with other projects, but it can be done, with a little help from my friends.

I think a month in Kenya is not going to be long enough ...

Finding Uses for a Pest - Water Hyacinth

Water Hyacinth - its the scourge of the waterways of the warmer bits of the planet, including Kenya.

As I have posted in a previous blog, while I was in Kenya, we had a day trip to Bungoma - it should have been longer, but the car hire charges didn't allow us to stay - and I was amazed at what these people are doing with this weed.

But our visit was to advise them on the use of water hyacinth as a feed stock for a methane generator. Of course, any organic matter can be used, but some are easier to use than others.

The problem with water hyacinth is that it is a floating weed, so if it is put into an anaerobic digester untreated, it will just float. It is also full of water, being an aquatic plant.

It floats because, on the leaf stem, under the leaf, there is a bulb which is hollow and filled with gas (air?). These have to be burst or removed. Crushing the plant seems like a good idea. Then not only would these little gas bulbs be burst, but some of the water would be expelled as well.

So, to my mind, to make water hyacinth suitable for anaerobic digestion, it needs to be crushed and chopped up.  This can be done manually, but wouldn't it be good if we could devise a machine to do it? Or better still, to reduce costs, use or adapt an existing machine to do the job!

This has been on my mind since my visit to Bungoma, where I was shown a press to make briquettes for cooking. They now have three presses and I started imagining putting two of them together and adding some sort of press across the two of them which would crush the plants, bursting the bulbs and squeezing out excess water. Hopefully, I will soon be able to put ideas to paper.

While I was cogitating on the weed problem, I was contacted by someone in the USA who pointed me to a YouTube video. This showed how to prepare water hyacinth for human consumption. Apparently, it is very nutritious, and as there is an abundance in countries where there are food shortages (e.g. Kenya), I am now wondering if there is a way to use the plant as a regular food source. After all, there is a lake full of the stuff in SW Kenya - and I am sure it exists in other lakes and slow-running water as well.

Water hyacinth apparently makes a very good fodder for cattle. In Florida, USA, they spend millions on removing and destroying the weed. They also spend millions on cattle feed - well, there's a no-brainer!

If you have first-hand knowledge as to where water hyacinth is prevalent in Kenya, please let me know in the comments. In fact, if you have any experience in the use of water hyacinth for anything, please contact me.

Kenya Trip - Bungoma

During my stay in Kisii, I was asked by someone in the USA to travel to Bungoma (4 hours by road) to meet up with an organisation that is doing all sorts of research with water hyacinth, a water weed from South America that has found itself in the waterways of much of equatorial Africa.

The first thing we needed was a car, so we contacted the guy who had picked me up from Nairobi, Dennis. Of course he would hire me his car, a recent model Toyota Corolla. We negotiated a price (Ksh 3,000)and that was that.

Until it came to signing the contract. then Dennis decided that as the road was "not too good" he would prefer that I used one of his tougher cars, a Toyota Crown Mk II. It would cost me a further Ksh 500.

On the day in question, the car was to be delivered to the nearest road access we had at 7am. We were there, but the car wasn't. We phoned Dennis. his driver didn't have a phone, so Dennis picked us up and we searched for the car. We found it 100 metres down the road.

We followed Dennis to his office and garage where he filled the car with fuel and charged me Ksh 5,300. I was pretty sure that I was not going to use a tankful and spent the next half-hour wondering if I could syphon off the fuel I didn't use.

We were finally under way, on the road from Kisii to Kisumu. It is a switch-back of a road through the steep hills of the area, but it was in good condition and we made good time.

We passed through Kisumu without mishap, other than Vincent, who was navigating, only knew the matatu route, which took us through some of the more savoury parts of the town. But, eventually was cleared the town and started climbing out of the Lake Victoria basin, which is rather flat and uninteresting.

Two hours later, we were in Bungoma, another typically busy African town, full of bustle and nouise (and cattle). We met up with Salim and his colleagues in their office, where we exchanged ideas about whet weach organisation was doing and hoping to do.

We, that is Vincent and me, and Salim and his two colleagues went on a tour of their projects. At  this point, I was glad to have the larger car.

First stop was at Salim's house where he showed us a press, made mainly of wood, which is used to compress partially dried water hyacinth into briquettes which can be used as an alternative for charcoal for cooking. The press was impressive, and locally built, paid for by the organisation in the USA.

Next stop was the shamba of Salim's father. He had donated some of his land so that Salim could test composted hyacinth. The land was divided into small plots, the first being a control plot with no fertiliser. All the others had been enriched with water hyacinth mixed with various other ingredients. The tests were ongoing, but there was a marked difference between the enriched plots and the control.

We discussed the possible location of a anaerobic digester in the compound. This would use water hyacinth (possibly mixed with cow slurry to speed up the the anaerobic process), to see how efficient it would be for producing methane. There are issues with water hyacinth, which i will go into on another blog. However, it should be suitable with the correct treatment.

While we were at the shamba, Salim showed me another project of theirs, cooking stoves. That's nothing new, I thought, but these are made from mud (not clay) mixed with sawdust. These burners are hand-made, although at a casual glance, they look as if they came out of a mold - they were that good.

It was a good day and gave me much food for thought, like how best to treat water hyacinth to use it in an anaerobic digester.

We set off for home (Kisii) after a late lunch (see previous blog). By the time we arrived in Kisumu, it was dark, African dark. On the road out, I was constantly swerving to miss bicycles and motorbikes with no lights and it was a relief to get back into the countryside, where i only had to avoid bigger vehicles without lights.

Then we were hit by the thunderstorms. Anyone who has not experienced an African Equatorial thunderstorm has no idea what they are like. I hit a T-junction that I did not remember on the outbound journey and asked Vincent if we should turn left. He was preoccupied with the Swahili music blasting from the radio and nodded.

Then we were in the middle of a storm. I had to stop. I could not see the road ahead. But when the rain abated and we were on the move again, I was passing signs mentioning Kericho. This town is too far to the east. We had gone wrong.

Vincent could not believe it and instructed me to do a U-turn. He was now concentrating fully, looking for anything he might recognise. He didn't find anything!

We continued into the countryside, caught up with the storm, stopped and after it had passed, continued on our way to ... wherever.

We passed a couple of lads and stopped to ask directions. As their luck would have it, we would be passing their front door on the way back to Kisii, so we gave them a lift.

The pointed out the road we needed when we dropped them off in the middle of a small, dark village, and we continued on ... and on ... and on.

We passed a Police checkpoint at the entrance to another small, dark village and started to climb. After about 5 km, Vincent thought that we should have turned right by the checkpoint, so we did another U-turn. We were running low on fuel so we coasted back down the hill for 5 kms.

What a waste of time! The policeman sent us back from whence we had come, back up the hill. But at the top, Vincent said that the lights to the right were Kisii, a reasonable assumption as it is the only large town in the area.

We found our right turn and Vincent brightened up. He was starting to recognise things. I was still worried as the fuel warning light had been on for a long time - and I was running out of cigarettes!

But, we made it. We found a kiosk open and I bought a very expensive packet of ciggies.

The next problem was what to do with the car. In Kenya, you do not just park a car at the side of the road if you want to keep the wheels. We went to the nearest hotel to the house. Ksh 250 for the night. We phoned Dennis who told us to go to his house and he would drop us home, where we finally arrived at 23:30.

Dennis was disappointed that the Toyota was almost empty - that was his excess profit gone, but Vincent and I were very pleased with the trip and could even laugh about getting lost in the wilds to the east of Kisii.

Kenya Trip - Methane

Soon after arriving in Kisii, I could be seen rummaging through the Kisii markets and street traders for bits to (finally) build an anaerobic digester, to produce methane, which i believe can be used as a cooking fuel, amongst other things.

I have ranted on about finding a sensible alternative to wood or charcoal for cooking and stating that methane is the best for most people in rural areas, so, I will not go into our reasons again - just yet.

The first component needed is, of course, a large gas-tight container. a 45 gallon oil drum is fine. At Ksh 2,500, it is not too expensive, but as a pale-skinned potential client, the price had risen inexplicably, but I am not a tourist and got the price back down again.

With a bag full of bits, mainly water plumbing fitments, I imagined that I could get the digester working. So we set off for the site and started to build.

Unfortunately, not all the bits fitted each other, other bits failed and yet others had the wrong thread (the hazard of buying in a market), but eventually, we had a sealed drum with an outlet with a gas-tight tap on it.

We loaded it with fresh slurry from the cow shed next door. Getting it through the standard 2" hole in the top of the oil drum was a trial - and very smelly - but we made a funnel from an old plastic container, which made the job easier. We topped up with rotted cow dung, mixed well and cooked at about 35C, the heat provided by the sun, of course.

According to all the reports I have read, an anaerobic digester takes about a week before it starts to produce methane, but maybe they didn't have the advantage of equatorial sun.

Being impatient, we could not wait the allotted week and tried out the gas that was being produced within a couple of days. It was not methane, or at least, it did not burn. We released all the gas out of the drum, hoping that we were releasing any oxygen, leaving only the product of the digestion process.

The next day was a success. The gas produced a flame!