Manic Planet Mechanics.

I wound up working this Saturday, and not the obligatory trip to my Social Service’s client.

ÍTR, my main employer at the moment put on workshop about Reggio Emilio, a rather well known (at least in Europe) educational philosophy developed in post-war Italy to ensure that fascism never raised its ugly head again.

So of course I went. The fact that I got paid for it didn’t hurt either.
I wound up “watching” the lectures in a side room with all the other foreigners, as the lecture was entirely in Icelandic. Not that I couldn't understand it, but I volunteered to help out the interpreter, gophering questions to the main hall, and because I knew it would be more fun.

It was. Mostly because we outlanders were disappointed with the lectures. We went there expecting an in-depth look into a well-developed methodology and instead got 4 hours of shit we already knew.

So we mostly argued points amongst ourselves, asked uppity questions, and cracked wise, causing gails out outlandish laughter to interrupt the staid and rather uninformative lectures.

Then my two punkish co-workers and one of their girlfriends walked over to my place for the first BBQ of the “summer” and massive amounts of beer.

The massive amounts of beer, combined with the extra long day on Friday and working on a Saturday convinced me that I had every right to laze about all day Sunday.

Well, “laze” is a relative term. I cleaned my apartment and the kitchen (somewhat hampered by a dishwasher that doesn’t want to work, I should have just done it by hand), and did some laundry. Mostly though, I watched TV.

Which was fine. I caught a new episode of Mythbusters (YAY) and some of their would-be competitors like Smash Lab (so lame, and so full of faulty quasi-science) and Brainiac (funny, but ditto on the science).

But the one show I feel obligated, in light of my recent methane blog to critique is the new offering from NatGeo (why the shortening?) called Planet Mechanics.

The show is about two borderline manic Brits who travel around in a bio-diesel fueled horse-carrier that’s been converted into a rolling workshop powered by solar panels and a small wind turbine whilst coming up with green solutions to engineering problems.

The episode I caught involved the manic duo traveling to the farm of an equally manic little farmer and trying to come up with a way to decrease his fossil fuel consumption by replacing it with resources already on the farm.

Good start.

Their main focus was on the gas-guzzling grain-dryer, which sucked up huge amounts of oil for every hour of operation.

The original plan, and by far the smartest, was to use the manure from the manic farmer’s cows to produce methane (which the manic mechanics insisted on calling “bio-gas”) to power the dryer. This made oodles of sense. The manure was there in bulk, its only use being fertilizer (which would only be improved by running it through a methane digester) and because the dryer is a stationary device, they could plumb the methane straight to the machine without needing to compress it into canisters (although if they did compress it into canisters they could use it to power the farmer’s fleet of diesel equipment as well).

So they get an old manure-spreader and convert it into a digester. All well and good. But they lack the imagination to use either the pressure of the gas itself, or the circulating solar-heated water that keeps the slurry warm enough, to power the agitators.

Nope, they just installed hand cranks.

On top of the round, difficult to climb digester.

Then they get a huge old oil tank to store the gas in, using the water bath technique. This involves bubbling the gas through water to float the tank, which prevents a possibly explosive air-gas mixture and uses the weight of the tank to provide pressure.

Of course they fuck this up too. First they attempted to lay the tank length-wise in an oval shaped bath, which, even if the bath had been structurally sound (it wasn’t, so they had to change their plans) would have been a less than ideal situation as far as weight/pressure goes. Then they decided that the only way it would work would be to cut the huge tank in half and put it in a vertical circular bath (which if they’d have bothered to learn anything about methane-plants they’d have done from the start). The only problem was that now with only “half a tank”, they didn’t have enough gas to run the dryer.

At which point I began to ask myself, “WHAT THE SWEET MONKEY FUCK!?!?!?!”

These guys are supposed to be engineers, right? So how come they can’t figure out that one half of a tank, plus the other half of a tank equal the whole fucking tank???? Not to mention that there would be an inherent benefit in a two-tank design, as it would allow for a more continuous process???

But no. They only use one half (apparently scraping the other perfectly good half). Then they sit around and scratch their heads trying to think up another way to fuel the dryer. Eventually the little skinny one hits on the idea of using the rape-seed that the manic farmer grows (as a cash crop) to produce oil to fuel the dryer.

So they buy a press (which originally had a large electric motor, which could have been powered by wind and solar with no CO2 emissions), hook it up to a junked lawnmower engine and running it on purified compressed methane, manage to convince themselves that with this system they’ll be able to power the dryer with “free green oil”.

Never mind that using the rape seed that the farmer is growing will cut into his profits and uses more fuel to plant and harvest. Never mind that petrol engines don’t work well off of “bio-gas” because they don’t compress as much as diesel. Never mind that they now have a massive Rube Goldberg device that uses cow muck to make half the fuel needed for the dryer, which is then fed into an inefficient engine, which then drives a press, which then produces oil (at a cost to the farmer’s profits) which is then loaded into the dryer….ARGH!

I mean, have none of these people ever heard of Second Fucking Law of Thermodynamics??? If the bio-gas isn’t enough to run the dryer, what makes these idiots think it would be in anyway efficient to use rape-seed, planted and harvested with a diesel combine milled in a press powered by the bio-gas and then burnt in the dryer??? That’s actually producing MORE CO2 AT A COST TO THE FARMER!!!

If these are the best the green revolution can offer, this planet if fucking doomed.