Talkin' 'bout my generators - students push conservation to the limit

By Karen Brandon
source: Chicago Tribune

July 29, 2001 (reprinted in Contra Costa Times on 8/18/01)

In the kitchen stands the pedal-powered blender, in the living room is the pedal-powered television, and at various times
all manner of appliances around this unusual 1930s-era bungalow have run on power generated by residents pumping away on
stationary bicycles.

The array of such "human energy converters" has included a pedal-powered laptop computer, a washing machine and, briefly, a
can opener, which was taken out of commission when someone realized it was easier to use a hand-held version than to pedal
away to run an electric model.

This is the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology at Humboldt State University, among the redwoods of remote northern
California in Arcata. CCAT (pronounced SEE-cat) is a fanciful monument to the pursuit of energy conservation and
environmental correctness that knows few limits. (The bathroom features a composting toilet, and the published cookbook
features tofu pot pie.)

Each year, three university students live here and demonstrate the house's energy-saving measures to visitors. The bungalow
uses about one-twentieth of the power consumed by the average U.S. household.

Heat comes both from a wood-burning stove and from warm air from the greenhouse, which is attached to the south side of the
dwelling. Windows are insulated by homemade thermal curtains of quilt batting and a Mylar vapor barrier. With the curtains
drawn, the windows are about two-thirds as insulated as the walls, the students say.

In a kitchen corner stands an old, unremarkable Kenmore gas oven, but Sean Dockery, an environmental science student, can
go on at length about its virtues.

"Either I use natural gas to boil my water or, if I had an electric stove, I would burn fossil fuel at a power plant in
order to make steam to spin a turbine to spin a generator to create electricity to send down power lines to flow to the
house to the stove to create heat very inefficiently," he says.

The students do only part of their cooking on this old stovetop anyway. Once a dish is brought to a boil, they put it into
the "hot box," a drawer lined with foam insulation and a wool Army blanket. "It takes about the same amount of time to
cook" as on the stovetop, says Emilia Patrick, another outgoing co-director. "It's really good for stews and rice and
beans."

They also cook in the back yard on the parabolic cooker, a solar-powered contraption that looks like a large metal
satellite dish. "You can make popcorn with it in a couple of minutes," says Lisa DiPietro, an incoming resident.

The refrigerator is so super-insulated that most of the freezer space is taken up by insulation. But the students insist
that don't need to keep much in the refrigerator because they use a "cold box," a cabinet with vents letting in cool air
from the north side of the house. "In the wintertime, it definitely suffices," Patrick says.

The house also is heavily insulated, and near the entryway is a cut-out panel that allows visitors to see what's behind the
walls: blown-in cellulose made of recycled newspapers.

The roof is a busy series of solar panels used to generate electricity, heat water and power the composting toilet. A wind
turbine generates some electricity, though residents say it needs to be several feet higher to really catch the breezes.
For those few times that their power needs exceed what the sun and wind can generate, there is a generator that runs on
"biodiesel" fuel. That, Patrick explains, is basically filtered vegetable oil from nearby restaurants.

Student Benjamin Terrell and two friends put biodiesel fuel to another test, driving a van dubbed the Grease Guzzler,
running on recycled cooking grease and smelling of french fries and chicken, from Berkeley, Calif., to Costa Rica.

In the spring CCAT newsletter, Terrell wrote of the experience, saying, "Sometimes I just yell to the sky, 'We are running
on vegetable oil!' But it isn't always only veggie oil; sometimes we stuffed in hard-core animal fat as thick as cold
pudding. I admit, there are moments we are truly going on the faith of experimentation."