"Videmail" - a way to communicate across continents and cultures?

Marcel Lenormand has started what I think will become a serious trend here at Solar Cities -- the use of what I call "videmail" to communicate otherwise complex concepts across continents and cultures.

(A propos, for zose of you who are Frranche, ze word "videmail" should be prrronounced "viddy-mail" -- as the Nadsat speaking teens in A Clockwork Orange would say it, "mail you can viddy with your glozzies, mate!" I know zat "vide-mail" means "empty mail" in ze Frrrranche language eef you prrrounounce it "veede-maile", mais qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire, ennnh? "Kara-te" means "empty handed" in Japanese but it doesn't stop it from ze hand being considered a lethal weapon against ze tomato... and perhaps ze vide-mail will turn out to be a lethal weapon against ignorance and poverty. Vive la liberte, egalite, fraternite! Vive la videmail!)

Umm...err... right. Sorry for the digression -- it's getting late and my glozzies are knackered and my rookers are all tunnel-carpel like, so basically I just wanted to express how excited I was when Marcel posted his animated answer to our question about building systems on roofs with inadequate sun due to partial shading on youtube, and how it inspired me to therefore answer the questions of solar cities' field coordinators Mahmoud Dardir and Hana Fathy down in Cairo, by posting the following viddy-o where not only Mahmoud and Hana can reach it and utilize it, but where anybody in the four corners of our non-euclidean world can comment, update, add to, learn from, teach to, share and make salad with.

The idea of this really short video (which is far far shorter than this lead in and is also dreadfully boring but for an (almost) original piece of music I composed by taking an orchestral sample that came with Apple Soundtrack software and adding live bass and guitar and an atrocious "we will rock you" drum sample) is to demonstrate a principle I learned yesterday at the Mullheim Umwelt conference.

There, Engineer Hans D. Sturmer, the Freiburg based inventor and patent holder of Sky Solar Tec's new hybrid Photovoltaic/Solar Hot Water System that uses silicon tubing instead of copper pipe, discussed our problems in Cairo with our do-it-yourself solar hot water systems and declared,

You must make sure when you use a copper pipe grid that the panels are not completely level because there are too many places for little air bubbles to get trapped in the system, and if you aren't using a water pump they won't get purged and the whole thermosiphon system will shut down. You should angle the panels slightly upward, just slightly. One degree is even enough, as long as there is a small incline. Remember that hot water, being less dense than cold water, rises, and bubbles rise, and you have to give them somewhere to rise to."

I immediately wrote that information in an email to Hana and Mahmoud down in Egypt and then, as I reread it, I thought -- "as good as their English is, being native Arabic speakers, they will probably have trouble with this. Even a native English speaker might have trouble understanding the way I explained what Engineer Sturmer explained to me (okay okay, the Americans might have trouble; the English, the Irish, the Scots the Welsh and the Aussies won't because they are naturally clever but 'I'menamerikinguddamit so i i what i'm sane').
The deal is that when I was with Herr Sturmer, he was holding a solar panel in his hands, demonstrating visually. But since I didn't have a video camera with me, I "quandered" (another made up word), how can I give Hana and Mahmoud, who don't have the luxury of traveling to meet inventors in Germany, an quasi-equivalent experience."

So when Marcel posted his solar heliostat animation on Youtube everything fell into place!

So here's the pitch:

Basically with the ostensibly free versions of multimedia tools we can get off the web you can now communicate your complex ideas in simple ways to simple folk and underprivileged folk and even your Aunt Bessie so we can all go solar fast. You don't gots to go to no fancy expensive school like Cal Arts or work for the Disney Studios.

This is something our family friend Richard Williams (director of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit") told me when I interviewed him for the Reader's Digest in London. He took me around his charming small studio in SoHo in the mid-eighties and said, "back when I first worked for Disney we had to have a whole production lot to make a single picture -- artists, inkers, painters, storyboarders, multiplane cameras, all that stuff. But today I can make complex films in a room in my house here in England by myself. And in a few years you'll see -- the computer will make it possible for anybody with a good story to tell to do fantastic things in film-making and animation."

Well Richard, your prediction came true -- and just as Disney used animation and film edutainment techniques to help the free world get through a terrible world war and to learn about the "wonderful world of nature" and the happiest things from utopian dreams to space technology, we can all now communicate about hopeful futures with one another around the tumultuous world from the safety of our laptops, and we can reduce the barriers that separate the technocrats and the body politic, the artists and the scientists, the engineers and the lay people. All the tools are out there, all we have to do is put them to use!

We will need to help each other out and give details of course:

Marcel used Flash, I think (Marcel can you let us know?). For my first attempt at a videmail I used Google Sketchup 6 to do the modelling of the actual Zabaleen school where we built our first solar hot water system, and a program called FRAPS to capture video on the PC.

I put the audio and music in using the voice over function in Final Cut Pro on a Mac, from which I was also able to export to mp4, and I know that Macs and FCP cost far more than most Egyptians (and most people on the planet) can afford, but perhaps somebody reading this can turn us on to a good freeware video editing program (note we absolutely hate the Windows Video Maker software ... ick!).

By the way, please don't judge the quality of this first effort too harshly -- it was meant a) to quickly get a concept across to our field coordinators in the slums of Cairo that is of vital importance to them and b) to encourage those of you with more talent and time to think about making CUSTOMIZED instructional material that can help people in the real world move quickly toward a fossil free future within the strictures and constraints of their local situation.

Your move...

Heliostats for Heliopolis!

Wow!

Our friend up north, Marcel Lenormand, the inimitable and ingenious engineer from England, has blessed Solar Cities with a fantastic 21st century way of communicating information across borders and cultural boundaries, creating domain general information that is at the same time intimately domain specific.

In this "videmail" (is that a word?) posted on Youtube, Marcel uses a devilishly simple and clever animation to help answer a question plaguing us in our efforts to bring solar power to urban rooftops in congested Cairo: "what do we do on buildings that don't have full solar exposure?" Marcel's doesn't just write a possible solution -- he makes his ideas manifest!

Marcel's suggestion for solving our specific urban Cairo problem can be viewed below:



This video gives great confidence to Solar CITIES coordinator Mahmoud Dardir, who is facing exactly this problem on his roof in Abu Nomros in Giza and who has been thinking of using reflectors (inspired by the traditional Egyptian use of having men with silvered boards posted at corners of the Saqqara pyramids shining and reflecting sunlight into the tombs before there were electric lights -- the use of torches was prohibited to keep soot from damaging the antiquities and to keep carbon monoxide from killing the visitors.

Now the question is, "how do we make a diy heliostat?" :)

As Mauro Cherubini over at EPFL would probably agree, the medium of animation is ideal for communicating these concepts across cultures!

Thanks Marcel!! You are inspiring, not only in your willingness to share and help the world with your expertise, but with the examples you set of the best way to use the multi-media available to bring the world together and get information to everyone!

Sincerely, T.H. and the Solar CITIES team

The Honeymooners, Talkin' Trash!

Documentary Filmmakers James Dean and Elisa Zazzera Conklin have to be the only people in the world to have spent their honeymoon in the slums of Cairo.

During their 10 day "Shahr Al Asl" they only spent two days in Alexandria. In fact, their first night in Egypt (the newlywed bride's first time in the Middle East!) they spent in our Solar Cities slum apartment in Darb Al Ahmar. When they arrived they had to tramp through the rain and mud, dragging their luggage and movie-making gear along the bumpy unpaved roads in the rabbit's warren that is historic Cairo.

The rest of the week they spent lugging their draggage through the garbage in the streets of Manshiyat Nasser/Muqattam hanging out with our buddies in the Zabaleen NGO "Roh El Shabab" and playing a little Arabic and environmental message rock and roll at community get togethers on sustainable development.



On one particular occasion, while in the street by a local workshop, video taping the torch welding of the copper pipes we use to make our solar hot water systems , a crowd gathered to find out what about the usual job of welding was of such unusual interest it would draw a couple of American film-makers.

We explained that James and Elisa were here from New York documenting the solar hot water project that was part of Solar CITIES' US AID grant helping Roh El Shabab bring renewable energy and infrastructural improvements to the community. But once we had uttered the words "U.S." people started hurling invectives about how awful America was and how Americans were the real terrorists, and a minor little commotion started. One older man, trying to keep control of the situation, immediately confronted James and Elisa and asked "what is your opinion of George Bush?"
With his usual aplomb James gave a thumbs down sign and Elisa corroborated with the universal language of facial semiotics (making a face of disgust) and we explained that most American's didn't vote for Bush (because, in fact, most didn't vote at all!) and many many many didn't agree with his policies, and that we certainly didn't want to be judged by our current administrations politics.

This explanation usually finds a friendly and sympathetic ear on "the Arab Street", because most underclass Arabs themselves are loathe to be judged by the behaviour of their governments (who do NOT represent their wishes) and are happy to have their theories that democracy is often hijacked by the rich and powerful corroborated.

Once it was established that James and Elisa were freelance documentary filmmakers, not part of CNN or some other corporate news show, had come here on their own time and their own nickel during their own vacation, and were not members of the elite society of "Haves" who have come to further exploit and make the "have nots" look bad (which is why few people are given permission by the community to film in their area) the encounter turned from muted hostility to open curiosity, but still with reservations about them filming.

That reservation faded however, once James and Elisa explained the true nature of their trip. When asked what brought them to Egypt (besides pro-bono filming the Solar Cities project of their friends T.H. and Sybille Culhane) they revealed that it was, in fact, THEIR HONEYMOON.

This was astonishing news to the local people. As they pointed out, like everyone else, even they left their garbage strewn community to celebrate their honeymoons if they could afford it -- nobody WANTS to be in the slums, even if it is home. Certainly not for a HONEYMOON!

But James and Elisa explained (through translation this time, and not just gestures!) that they have a dedication to environmental issues and social improvements and that spending their honeymoon among the Zabaleen and among the residents of Darb El Ahmar was one of the most eye opening and wonderful experiences for a young American couple starting out the journey of married life, because it put them in touch with "the real", helped them understand the world and its challenges, got them to know new friends from truly different cultures, and gave them perspective on how fortunate they were and how they could share their blessings. What better way to start a new family life?

After this admission, the crowd was all smiles and "tafaddals" ("welcomes") and from then on, filming was easy. The community got to know and trust James and Elisa (especially thanks to Solar Cities coordinators Hana Fathy and Mahmoud Dardir, and Roh El Shabab director and playwright Ezzat Naem Guindy) and people knew that they wouldn't be "talking trash" about the trash collectors. In fact, they would help people to understand and see "trash" in a new light.


One of the results of The Honeymooners' Zabaleen Odyssey is a music video called "Talkin' Trash" which is part of their upcoming documentary "Recycle Circus", part three of the Environmental Circus trilogy:
Solar Circus: The Circus Guy Egypt Tour, 2004
Water Circus
Recycling Circus

You can view a preliminary cut of the music video here:




http://www.greenheadmedia.org/movies/talkintrashrev2.mov





Enjoy.

Oh... and don't forget to take out the trash, and when you do, to separate organic and inorganic wastes. The Zabaleen, and we, will thank you for it!

An Open Letter to the security guard Karam Ahmad Alladin about using a refrigerator to heat water...

Photo: Karam (left) with T.H. (Taha) Culhane and fellow security guard at the Al Azhar Park gate.




Dear Karam,

Many people know you only as the friendly Egyptian security guard who protects foreign visitors to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and guards the gate at the ancient wall separating the well-to-do dining in fine restaurants in the verdant playground Al-Azhar Park and the crowded urban poor ekeing out a living in the muddy winding unpaved streets of Darb Al Ahmar. Others know you as the reliable plumber always willing to lend a hand (as you did when I was building a solar hot water system on the roof of our Solar Cities building in your neighborhood).

I have the great fortune to know you as all this and more; I know you as Karam the visionary and innoventor, a man who is always thinking and dreaming of new possibilities. I know you as Karam the public welfare enthusiast, who has taken me around the community to meet with 80 year old pensioners in 700 hundred year old buildings with sunny roofs who would like their grandchildren to live in a more hopeful Egypt and are thus willing to let us (and to help us!) experiment with home-made hot water systems in their building. I know you as Karam, as generous as the meaning of the name "Karam", a storehouse of local information, the karam who gave of his time and risked his job one night to take me by the hand to a decrepit, recently closed, once beautiful, but still fascinating 300 year old public bath to meet with the owners so we could find a way to revive this lost tradition in historic Cairo. I know you as Karam the solar enthusiast who explained to the owners how they could bring back the public baths by switching to solar heating and lighting and thus, in the long term, keep costs low so that the whole community could enjoy the health and psychological benefits of abundant hot water.

Photo: Karam (left) introduces Taha (wearing his characteristic Solar Powered Back Pack) to the Wahiya family that has been running the recently closed 300 year old Darb Al Ahmar Hammam (Public Bath), around the corner from the Solar Cities office, for more than 80 years. Karam used to go there as a child, and wanted to see if there is a possibility to re-open it and run it on solar energy. The baths used to be fueled by waste heat generated from the cooking of "Ful" (Fava beans); the heat was supplied by the burning of waste paper from the city's garbage, collected by the Wahiyas (the garbage recyclers who came from the Oases, or "Wahiya" in the desert, preceeding the migration of the Zabaleen from the Countryside 50 years ago. Both the Wahiya and the Zabaleen are intensely interested in reviving the public bath tradition and finding sustainable ways to heat the water. The burning of waste material to heat water was forbidden for health reasons, but the costs of oil, gas and electricity make heating public baths too expensive to keep operational costs within reason.)

Photo: Solar Cities Coordinator Mahmoud Dardir (left ) on a roof overlooking the public baths with the owner of the local garment factory housed within the building. Karam (right) has convinced the factory owner to let Solar Cities build a demonstration solar hot water system on his building so the family running the public baths can get an idea of how the system works. The factory owner loved going to the public bath next door as a kid, saying it was easy for his mother to get all the kids clean in no time. Many residents, who must now heat water on the stove to get a bucketful of hot water for their evening "shower", lament the passing of this tradition -- there used to be more than 300 public baths in the Darb Al Ahmar region -- so many that at the turn of the century a visitor remarked "you could bathe in a different bath every day of the year!" Today there are only two remaining.

I also know you as Karam the security guard with a real interest in the true security of the Egyptian people -- security from the things that really count -- security from hunger, security from power failures, from water shortages, from impending energy crises and from the rising price of goods.

Finding solutions to these problems, you have always understood, is "real homeland security". And you have impressed on me that America's homeland security depends on real homeland security in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, where freedom from the tyranny of worry is the only thing that can really prevent young idealists from getting hijacked into following the empty, deadly promises of fundamentalist insanity.

Today at the "Umwelt" show in a shopping mall in Dortmund, northern Westphalia (the part of Germany where the eternal optimist, Candide, came from in Voltaire's social satire) my wife and I were reminded of you when we saw a vendor's exhibit on the Geothermal heat pumps he had for sale.

The vendor was a very forward-thinking German "Braucherwasserwarmepumpe" company called "Vaillant Deutscheland GmbH & Co." Brauchwasserwarmepumpe is an extremely long word that literally translates into "Needwaterwarmingpump". I had the good fortune to meet Vaillant's patient and knowlegable salesman, Timo Krugman, who knows that you don't have to hard sell renewable energy products - moving customers to clean, sustainable energy systems and away from its addiction to filthy carcinogen-spewing, smelly, war-fostering fossil fuels is like moving water from the mountain to the sea. It is so inevitable (though so long in coming) that it sells itself. All the salesman has to do is build your confidence that his company is the most reliable and knowlegeable. In this spirit, Timo was not at all pushy, on the contrary his interest was in helping me understand the physical principles, the engineering, the mechanics and the environmental and economic advantages undergirding the ground source heat pump revolution, something virtually unknown in Egypt, but well established in Europe and California.

In order to capture the attention of the public, wandering between McDonald's and GameStop and H & M, the principles behind how ground source heat pumps work (and why it is worth investing 20 to 30 thousand Euro in such a heating and cooling system) the clever folks at Vaillant had taken a compressor out of a refrigerator and mounted it on a display board that showed a picture of a house and had some pipes simulating a geothermal system.



It turns out that a heat pump is basically just a super-sized refrigerator or air conditioning system that makes use of the stable temperatures underground as a heat sink.

In true science museum fashion, the clever vendor had hooked up a normal refrigerator compressor up to some copper heat exchanger coils above and below the compressor, with digital temperature read-outs next to both. The upper coils were mounted on the drawing of the household's basement water storage tankand the lower coils were mounted on the plastic pipes running down the picture of the household's backyard, from the backyard lawn to the sandstone 100 meters deep.





The legends around the pictures explained that a geothermal heat pump (a full sized version of which was sitting next to the exhibit) is basically a refrigerator or air conditioner compressor that uses the heat generator by compressing the HFC refrigerant to heat water in the house, and lets the cold created by the endothermic phase change of the refrigerant (after it passes through the expansion valve -- the larger piece of copper tube with the tiny coil beneath it that you find on the back of your fridge) be reheated by the warmer ambient temperature of the water in the geothermal tubes. This warmed gas can them be compressed back into a hot fluid as the cycle starts again back at the compressor.







The vendor had a button you could push that would start the compressor. Within minutes the compressor had reached 56.6 degrees C, and you could put your hand on the copper coils to fell for yourself what the temperature gauge showed.





Meanwhile, the lower coils began to accumulate frost, just like the inside of your freezer, which kids could touch and play with as they observed the temperature gauge dropping to - 2.2 degrees C.



It was a simple way to demonstrate the principles of geothermal or ground source heat pumps. But to us it was much more -- it was proof of "Karam's concept."



Do you remember, early on, before I got to know you and thought you were "just another security guard", when you were letting me into the gate at the old Ayyubid wall one night around 2 a.m. after I had taken my wife to Salah Salem street to catch a cab to the airport, when you asked if I thought is was possible to use your refrigerator to get hot water?

As we climbed up the inside of the ancient stone staircase by the light of your torch you suddenly paused and said something like "You are Taha who builds solar hot water systems in the community. I would like very much to build a solar hot water system on the roof of our house, but even if I could afford the materials, I don't think my uncle would agree to it. We are having a dispute and since he technically owns the roof space he might forbid me.

"But I have been thinking for some time now why it wouldn't be possible to use the heat behind the refrigerator to make my water hot. I noticed that the compressor gets very hot, and we waste this heat letting it go into the air through that metal grill behind the fridge. All it does is make the kitchen hotter -- the one place in the house we don't need extra heat! So I was thinking, 'couldn't I use that heat to make hot water?' It would not only provide hot water, but it might keep the kitchen cooler. Also, if the hot water tank was above the fridge we would naturally have some water pressure, we wouldn't have to buy or build a stand, and we wouldn't have to mount a heater on the wall, which is a problem in these old buildings with crumbling walls. What do you think?"

I remember replying that I thought the idea was brilliant, and that I certainly thought it was possible, and that I had even discussed the idea once with fellow Solar Cities founder Mustafa Hussein, the local carpenter, when we learned his roof couldn't hold the weight of a solar hot water tank (I had read somewhere on the web once that an American company during World War II had built and marketed hybrid refrigerator/water heaters, but that they had ceased production when oil became cheap in the 1950's.) But we abandoned the project, I said, because sadly I had no experience in such matters and gaining experience takes time and money. I told Karam back then we would simply have to try if we could ever get some seed money to do some experiments, but I didn't know when that would be because, as I told him, it is hard to get seed money for unproven ideas. And it is certainly hard for the poor, like us, to put money into things that have an uncertain payoff.



Photo: Carpenter and Solar Cities local co-founder Mustafa Hussein, on his way home from the woodshop, discusses his new device with Karam -- an easier method for putting grooves in aluminum sheets so that copper pipes can be put inside -- a very important step in making absorber plates for home-built solar hot water systems.




Sadly, in all that time, we never did get money to make hybrid refrigerator/water heater experiments, though we fortunately DID get the money from U.S. AID to build the solar hot water heater that we are going to put on your new apartment now that you have moved from your uncle's!

But I never forgot that question you posed when I first met you, and today Sybille and I found the answer in a shopping mall in Dortmund! Because it was a hands-on-exhibit, and not some theoretical paper or some 2 dimensional diagram, I got a real firm sense of how we can build your refrigerator/heater, and I am hoping somebody can help me translate this letter into Arabic and share it and these pictures with you.



First of all, I would suggest you remove the compressor from the bottom at the back of the fridge and place it on the top of the fridge where it will be closer to your fridge top mounted water tank. That way we won't lose more heat to the air (which is why those refrigerator coils are there on the back of the fridge to begin with) and we won't have to invest much money in insulation; we want the shortest run from the compressor to the hot water tank as possible. The heat exchanger could come right off the compressor, and to increase its heat we could even wrap some of the copper coils around the compressor itself. This should also keep the compressor cooler and that should make it run more efficiently, no? I think I would make a metal stand for the water tank, and place the compressor underneath it on the top of the fridge, and put styrofoam around the whole thing so that all the heat goes into the water, but I'm not sure about that part -- I think we need a way for the compressor to cool down when the water is hot in the storage tank, so maybe we should leave it open. Experimentation will tell.

The bottom part of the system, where the expansion valve is, would remain the same, cooling the freezer from the top (because cold air falls; it thus seems better to cool the top part of the fridge).

I have posted these pictures and suggestions on the internet, Karam, because real engineers with much better understanding will be able to comment and help improve the system, making it more and more feasible to bring it to fruitition. Hopefully, next time I am in Cairo, we can start experimenting.

Until then, keep coming up with those great ideas, keep up your innovative curiosity, and keep having the insight and courage and enthusiasm to bring them up to visitors to your beleagured community who have the great great fortune and luxury to be able to travel around the world meeting with people and seeing exhibits that can provide solutions and turn the dreams of "the other 90%" into realities.

I know that such a combination of local and outside expertise can bring true homeland security to all of us!

Salaam,

Taha Rassam (T.H.) Culhane
Founder, Solar CITIES

Can income uncertainty predict use of electric water heaters among the Cairo poor?

Justification for posing and posting the question here: Solar CITIES is interested in finding out what the barriers are to adopting solar hot water systems in Egypt, and T.H. Culhane has chosen to research hot water demand among the poor to understand existing hot water system choices.

The "energy ladder" literature assumes that "progress" in development involves a move away from "natural fuels" (biomass and environment-mediated solutions) toward the Edisonian panacea for civilization - the modern miracle of electricity. Such literature shows residents of developing countries climbing an "energy ladder" whose bottom rung is solid fuels -- animal dung, wood, and detritus, whose intermediate rungs take them on a lexicographic climb through charcoal to coal to oil-based liquid fuels and from there on to gaseous fuels (methane, butane, propane etc.), peaking at the spiritual apex of the transformation from mass to energy with the use of the quantum fields of nearly massless electrons.

One might argue that solar energy is a further evolution up this ladder , reasoning that light is the lightest of all things -- massless and pure, and we could conceivably use this argument in favor of solar energy on a psycho-spiritual level, saying "FIAT LUX" in a Godly tone to motivate policy makers to create mandates for solar energy.

The problem is that the energy ladder is an absurd fiction.

For one thing, since biomass and fossil fuels are all stored transformations of light energy, and are thus all forms of "solar energy", the metaphor breaks down. Our concern at Solar CITIES is not to get people to abandon various form of energy storage -- we assume that light energy must be stored somehow to be useful, and it is as immaterial to us as it is to the urban poor what form of storage we use PROVIDED THAT THE LIBERATION OF THAT STORED ENERGY DURING USE DOES NO HARM TO ANYBODY OR ANYECOSYSTEM.

For another thing, electricity does not by itself constitute a medium in any way equivalent to the fuels that supposedly precede it in the energy ladder literature. Electricity is not a form of stored or potential energy, it is a carrier of kinetic energy. When people "switch" from biomass or fossil fuels to electricity they are not necessarily switching from anything at all -- the electricity provider could also be using the stored energy in biomass or fossil fuels in order to generate the electricity being shipped to the household.

When this is the case, using electricity to heat water in a household can do double environmental damage because its creation and transport involves huge losses in first and second order efficiencies and thus results in by products and residuals causing what we call "negative externalities." Those externalities have a cost associated with them, and when those costs are internalized (as they must some day be) then the price of the electricity will reflect those costs and could end up far more expensive than the original price of the fuel that stored the potential energy.

In Cairo, probably for these reasons (primarily the rising price of oil), the cost of electricity is going up quickly and sharply. Many of the urban poor are beginning to question the rationale behind purchasing and/or using electric appliances for utilities, such as heating water, for which substitute goods exist. Some of our colleagues, particularly those in the Zabaleen community who own pigs, are even arguing that it makes more sense to produce biogas in the community and either continue using the kitchen stove or buy a gas heater to take advantage of this. They all see that it would make more sense to burn the biogas directly to heat water than burn it in a combustion engine to drive a dynamo to generate electricity to heat a coil to then heat water.

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in physics or engineering to figure that one out!

So the energy ladder hypothesis is breaking apart in the inner city.

The question then remains -- why and when will the poor prefer electricity for heating water?

In my last blog entry I talked about the need for clean fuels in houses without ventilation. Electricity also offers the advantage of being "push button easy."

But is it suitable for households with income uncertainty? If it IS suitable as a method of heating water, in what way can we make the provision of electricity safer for the poor -- not just in terms of the danger of electrocution and fire-starting, but in terms of its rising costs of supply and the danger of service interruptions?

These are some questions that emerge from my study. At the bottom of this entry is some data to explore the questions. But first, a justification for using a blog to write a Ph.d. thesis that I have to get off my chest:


Blogging your Dissertation

I'm sure I am not the only graduate student who is using the blogging phenomenon to write his dissertation. It serves several purposes actually.

One is to overcome the anxiety of losing one's data due to a hard disk crash or to theft or destruction of one's computer. I have had these tragedies occur three times in my life -- as a Senior at Harvard my bag with my drive and disks and all my thesis materials was stolen from me down at Tommy's Bar and Grill by a punk in leather and chains. I was able to chase him down and -- the only time I've used the threat of violence against an assailant - force him to give me my bag back; at the bus stop on the way to the airport from the L.A. Eco-Village one early morning in 2003 I was mugged and beaten up at gun point by two drug addicts and had all my luggage stolen - including my laptop and my backup drives (kept in separate pieces of luggage "for safety") and had to painfully recreate my three Ph.D. field papers from scratch (it took me over a year and a half, delaying my advancement to candidacy); at UCLA last year my new laptop suddenly died without warning -- in this case, fortunately, I was able to remove the hard-disk and reload the contents on a new computer -- once I could afford one!

For parapatetic people like me, carrying my laptop around the world and into ghettos and slums, riding public transit and walking for hours in the hot sun on dangerous roads or climbing onto rooftops, the internet and the generous hosting services of folks like those at blogspot.com make it possible for me to save and store critical data, writings and images on a world-accessible computer so that, should I suffer such losses again, I can recover what I was working on from any internet connected computer in the world. That is key.

Another reason emerges from the first argument -- by working on my thesis on a globally networked computer server, I don't NEED to carry my expensive and vulnerable laptop and hard-drives around the world -- I can stop into an internet cafe and pick up where I left off.

But there is a more important social reason for writing one's dissertation "on-line" that has to do with collective intelligence. A nice justification can be found on page 28 of "Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart" wherein the Gigerenzer and Todd and the ABC Research Group state, "Indeterminate theories hinder scientific progress by resisting attempts to prove, disprove or improve them. In this book, we therefore propose computational models of heuristics, putting our theoretical cards on the table so that others can see them -- and even pick them up and play with them."

I love that: put your theoretical cards on the table so others can pick them up and play with them!

The nightmare of every "social welfare" motivated Ph.D. student is that his/her dissertation will end up "sitting on some shelf somewhere, unread, gathering dust". I cannot tell you how many times people have used that as an excuse to get me to hurry up and get my Ph.D. finished, thinking that it will somehow motivate me to know that nobody really gives a hoot what I say in my thesis. In fact the opposite occurs -- if the opportunity costs of what I am doing are not somehow offset by the utility my research will give to the world, then I lose all interest and hope. The idea that we should just "get the thing done" so we can "move on to the important things in life" belies the motivational foundations of the entire enterprise (I know Brown University's environmental science graduate student Andy Posner can sympathize!).

Doing a Ph.D. merely in order to get a degree so one can climb the social ladder is the poorest motivation for somebody involved in social welfare. And this is particularly true in a field like mine where the three letters behind your name do little or nothing to enhance your economic prospects.

In fact, students like me are motivated most by the idea that we might contribute a little something to our collective understanding of certain grave problems facing humanity, and that somehow, by getting those contributions out there, we might find some solutions.

So the blog, for students like me, is the perfect environment to write a Ph.D. -- particularly when we are so often abroad, and cut off from our professors and our fellow students, and completely out of touch with the energiziing discussions and debates that help hone theories and lead to scientific progress.

For that reason, I thank those of you who have been reading my arcane posts and leaving comments -- making me feel like I am in a virtual and democratic seminar which is, in my mind, the best possible use of this global medium -- and I invite any and all others reading this blog to contribute and challenge and cajole and question and share. You will definitely get credit in my acknowlegements in the actual paper tome that will be gathering dust in the UCLA library!

But most importantly, you are helping me, and our fellow stakeholders in the urban poor areas of Cairo, figure out how we can improve welfare for those who suffer from deprivation, and helping me get the professional degree that will help us gain the political clout we need to take our ideas for community-based participatory ideas for sustainable development to a higher policy level.

So with that justification, I now will continue to present in these blogs my preliminary data and unformed ideas on the use and demand for hot water services among the urban poor of Cairo, always keeping in mind that at some point we are all going to have to implement WATERGY (water and energy)solutions that do not harm our environment or rely on non-renewable resources.

So now, let us ask,

"Can income uncertainty predict the use of electric water heaters among the Cairo poor?"

The assumption is that people who do not have steady jobs are averse to using watergy solutions that lock them into a fixed payment schedule in general, and particularly averse to technologies whose monthly cost burdens have low predictability. If you don't know how much you are going to pull in each month, and you further don't know if your use of the technology is going to present you with a bill higher than you can pay, you will probably avoid that technology in favor of one that allows tighter cost control.

To investigate this question, our survey asked our respondents a simple binary question whose best translation into English is "is your work steady or interrupted", meaning, in our communities "do you have a steady job, or are you scavenging for work on a daily level".

Later in the survey we asked what kind of hot water heating systems the family uses.

The results are as follows:



As you can see, in the Zabaleen community, only 23 % of those with uncertain income used electric heaters, as opposed to 37% of those who held steady jobs. In Darb El Ahmar half the people who had uncertain income had electric heaters, as opposed to 61% of those who had steady jobs.

The ratio of people with uncertain income to those with steady jobs is 136/89 or 1.5 in the Zabaleen sample, as opposed to 127/104 or a ratio of 1.2 in Darb El Ahmar.

Ventilation in the slums: A Game of Cat and Mouse?

(Photo: The Cat in the Rat Strikes Back: While most cats in the Zabaleen community have learned (through painful experience?) to ignore or run away from rats, this frisky young fellow, under Adham Fawzi's bed, has proved his worth to the family by nabbing a would-be intruder. One of Solar CITIES coordinator Hana Fathy's relatives recently lost a newborn baby daughter to rats that invaded her crib and ate through her delicate head -- a tragic and frightening prospect for any young family.)

Because of the persistent rat threat in the Zabaleen community, many families are forced to board up windows and other openings, making their homes' air quality, in terms of smoke, carbon monoxide, off-gassed pollutants from synthetics and airborne disease organisms, health hazardous. The trade off is of vital concern to residents, but the cost of glass windows and fitting window frames, of well fitting doors and the cost of finishing walls is so high that families are forced to simply board things up.

Given that people must cook and heat water on gas stoves indoors, the urgency of providing flame-free heating systems is manifest. Since solar hot water systems involve no burning of any fuel they are ideal for families in rat-infested communities. Their price however, even when home-built, is prohibitive (roughly 2,500 LE, or $500) for families earning as little as 400 LE (20 dollars) per month.

Another solution is electric water heating, applicable where the electric infrastructure is safe enough to support the heavy load (electric heaters can consume between 1500 and 4000 watts, depending on design). In the informal housing sector electric wiring is often substandard and dangerous; most houses in Cairo in general are completely ungrounded, and the combination of wall mounted electric water heaters, damp walls, wet concrete floors and flowing shower water is a deadly mix. Many families speak of receiving shocks and of knowing people who have been electrocuted in the shower. Other families, however, consider electric heaters safer than gas heaters.

Certainly electric heating has no adverse effect on indoor air quality. It would thus seem well suited for families in rat infested areas where bathroom and kitchen windows need to be boarded up.

Could uncertain income explain why so few people use them?

Electric heating, preferred by only 54.5% of the surveyed population in Darb El Ahmar, and only 28.4% of the Zurayib Zabaleen, may be too expensive for people whose incomes are uncertain.

In our survey 60% of the Zabaleen have uncertain monthly incomes, and 55% of the craftspeople of Darb El Ahmar have no way of knowing how much they will bring in at the end of every month.


Does this correlate with possession of an electric hot water heater? First of all, let us look at the aggregate data, without considering household correlations. In the case of the Zabaleen, it does seem as if income uncertainty/certainty has some explanatory value in predicting disuse/use of electric hot water heaters:

It is less clear, however, if this "cue" discriminates in the case of the Darb El Ahmar community, and can thus be used as a basis for an inference. In Darb El Ahmar only 40% of the people have certain incomes, yet 54.5% use electric heaters. We have not yet run the statistical tests to see if this is significant.





Still, the argument from income uncertainty is compelling: All of the families in our samples depend on electricity for lighting, refrigeration and fans, and since a third of electricity demand can be consumed by grossly inefficient "resistance heating" appliances (i.e. appliances that use the heat generated by metal coils when high current electrons are forced through them), most families are afraid of high electric bills whose non-payment could result in a total suspension of service. In other words, overuse of an electric heater could result not only in the electricity to the heating appliance being cut, but to electricity being cut to the whole household! They would thus prefer not to use electric heaters and guarentee that they can pay their monthly bills and keep the lights on.

And in an a dank, dark apartment without windows or ventilation, keeping the lights on is of paramount importance, to say nothing of being able to use a fan...

How extant is the lack of ventilation? It is hard to tell from our data. Our survey contained the question "is there ventilation is the bathroom (yes/no)" and "is there ventilation in the kitchen (yes/no). " The problem is that the Arabic literally reads ,"are there openings for air" ("fatHat Al Tahweya"). When I went into homes that I knew had boarded up windows and conducted the survey myself, the respondents said "yes" to both questions, even though I could see (in the dim half light of the naked bulb hanging in the adjacent room) that the openings were sealed. In one such house, that of my friend Moussa, he said, "well, we have the openings, and we intend one day to put proper windows in." "And when do you intend to do that?" I asked. The reply: "When we have money, maybe in a year or two..."
This is typical for incremental housing situations.
Such homes would be listed as "having ventilation -- meaning that in construction a "manwar" or "light well" was provided, and an opening in the bare brick wall was left. But functionally these homes are not ventilated.

The survey, however, which was conducted by a team of three people in Darb El Ahmar and a team of 6 people in Zurayib, who went through the 9 pages of questions like a checklist, only captures those households that specifically stated they have no ventilation.

The data reveals the following:

Zarayib:

Darb El Ahmar:

Clearly the Zabaleen, in the rat infested garbage collection area of the city, have worse ventilation, with 16% of our sample (N = 225) having no bathroom ventilation and 15% having no kitchen ventilation. Darb El Ahmar fares better with 5% of the sample (N = 231) having no bathroom ventilation and 10% of kitchens having no ventilation. Of course, Darb El Ahmar doesn't have the same problem with rats.

History of ventilation among the urban poor:

In urban environments proper ventilation can be a matter of life and death.

For a good history of ventilation see Chapter 2 of the Indoor Air Quality Handbook

By John D. Spengler, Jonathan M. Samet, John F. McCarthy



Written by the Harvard Graduate School of Design's Dr. D. Michelle Addington, the chapter explores ventilation concepts and laws from the first century B.C. to the present, and relates how carbon monoxide from heating fuels caused many deaths in homes without ventilation until building codes mandated vents. You can find excerpts from it here.

Unfortunately, as was brutally pointed out last month when another apartment building in Egypt collapsed, killing the residents, Egyptian buildings rarely if ever are built to code standards. This is true of formal areas (the collapsed building was in relatively upscale Alexandria) but is particularly true in informal communities. This same lack of code construction, however, also makes smoke-free electric heaters a lethal possibility; many people tell stories of knowing people who died by electrocution in the shower, though we have no data suggesting the frequency of such an occurrence.

A very interesting blog entry on urbanplanningtheory.blogspot.com reviews a book called
Housing in Urban Britain, 1780-1914 and contains the following summary:

"Why did slums and suburbs develop simultaneously? Were class antagonisms to blame? Why did the Victorians believe there was a housing problem? The history of housing between 1780 and 1914 encapsulates many problems associated with the transition from a largely rural to an overwhelmingly urban nation, whose unprecedented pace imposed immense tensions within society. This book reviews the recent arguments and guides the student of social history to further reading, making it an ideal introduction to a central issue in nineteenth-century history".


The book may as well have been written about the history of Cairo housing between 1960 and the present, during which time it has had to deal with "the many problems associated with the transition from a largely rural to an overwhelmingly urban nation"; as was well presented in Roh El Shabab director Ezzat Naeem Guindy's theatrical play on the history of the Zabaleen (in which Adham Fawzy and his sister starred) these "immense tensions" have characterized the lives of the dwellers of the Zurayib community since the Zabaleen began arriving there half a century ago.

The book contains a passage from 1869 (on Page 32) describing the high death rate of the English slums that could be applied to Cairo today : "the rate of mortality depends upon the efficiency of the ventilation".

Preliminary Results of Hot Water Usage and Demand Survey

The graph shows the differences between the Zabaleen Community of Zurayib and the Historic Cairo Community of Darb El Ahmar in terms of hot water usage. As is evident from the graph, the largest percentage of hhouseholds interviewed in Zurayib (N=225) use their kitchen stoves to heat water for bathing (46.7%) while the largest percentage of households in Darb El Ahmar (N=231) use small electric heaters (54.5%). There is still an appreciable number of people using kitchen stoves in Darb El Ahmar (20.8%) but a much greater number of people in Darb El Ahmar use wall mounted gas heaters (fueled by a butagas bottle since there are no gas pipelines in Darb El Ahmar) -- 19.5% versus 7.1 % for the Zabaleen.





Technically, the data show that only 35.6% of the Zabaleen in Zurayib posess "hot water appliances" per se (Electric or Gas hot water heaters sold specifically for heating bathing water) , while 64.5% make multiple use of simple technologies normally used for cooking in order to heat their bathing water.

This is contrasted with 74% of the households in the Darb El Ahmar area, with 26% using cooking apparatus for heating bath water. Thus the Zabaleen case is almost the inverse of the Historic Cairo case (nearly 65 % without heating appliances in the former versus nearly 75% posessing heating appliances in the latter.)

The figure for the Zabaleen Zurayib area is consistent with data from an old GTZ study that showed the residents of what they dubbed MN4 (the Manshiyat Nasser area that consists of Zurayib) having up to 3/4 of households having "no hot water". Our study, of course, contradicts their description of the situation (we find that 100% of all households have hot water from somewhere, but that approximately 65% don't have hot water appliances per se. Economic studies, unlike studies in physics, look at what are ostensibly moving targets -- more people could have purchased hot water appliances since the GTZ study (approximately 10% more) as hot water appliances and advertising become more and more ubiquitous throughout the city. What is most interesting are those families that have purchased hot water heaters, gas or electric, but have ceased using them and gone back to heating water on a stove.


(Photo: Aba Nob's mother in the Zabaleen community heats water for her family on a "Hamil" or "portable" ground stove with rubber gas tube and large bottle)

Another interesting finding was that there was a much greater reliance on the "Hamil" as a water heating source among the Zabaleen (11.6% versus a mere 0.4%). The "Hamil" is a floor mounted grill that is connected by a rubber gas pipe to a large bottle of gas. It can have from one to 4 "eyes" (flames). It has an advantage over smaller "one-eye portable stoves" in that one can connect it to any size bottle, and one can put larger buckets of water on it. It's greater use in the Zabaleen homes may be due to culture and availability, but it also probably reflects the larger bare open spaces in the cement and brick Zabaleen homes, usually on the ground floor of the family owned building where people collect to cook and bathe. Darb El Ahmar has small multi-family apartments with tiny bathrooms that would not accomodate the "hamil". So Darb El Ahmar bathrooms would be better suited to a small one-eyed portable butagas stove, or to use of the existing kitchen stove.

(Photo: The author, T.H. Culhane, preparing a 20 liter bath on a "one-eye butagas stove" in his apartment in Darb Al-Ahmar after the heating element in his 50 Liter electric heating appliance burned out due to use when the water supply was cut. From a January 28 start temperature of 14 degrees, The one-eye butagas stove has heated the 20 liters to 31 degrees after 12 minutes. In another minute the water was at 32 degrees C, warm enough to take a comfortable bath, but not ideal. After 16 minutes the water had reached 36 degrees, the temperature of the water in the German public bath. The author waited 19 minutes, however, to get the water to 40 degrees because the air was cold and he wanted the bath to feel hot. Several independent tests with stopwatch and temp gauge revealed that the average time for heating 20 liters of water to bath temperature was 20 minutes).

The data show that the Zabaleen use the one-eye butagas stove more than the Darb Al-Ahmar community (4.4 % of the sample versus 0.4%) but the 0.4 % figure could be misleadingly low since many respondents in Darb El Ahmar have both kinds of stoves - a kitchen stove and a portable one-eye -- in their apartments. Cairenes use the word "butagas" to refer to both the kitchen stove and to these small portable one-eyed stoves (and sometimes even to refer to the "hamil", since all three use the same fuel (Butagas bottles). To correct for this we asked respondents how many "eyes" their butagas stove has, and asked them to identify the type of stove they use for bathing from a set of pictures. However, many families who had both a kitchen stove and a portable one-eye stove actually use both at different times (for example, using the one eye portable when the kitchen stove is being used for cooking, but eschewing the use of the portable stove when their are children around because of the fear that they will trip on it or kick it over). The surveyors often failed to capture when this was the case, noting on the survey sheet people who had kitchen stoves and used them for bathing as "butagas stove users" and people who did not have kitchen stoves but heated on one-eye stoves as "one-eye stove users." This reflects a flaw in the methodology -- future surveys should specifically find out when families who have stoves also invested in a portable stove and why, and when they use it. The purchase of a one-eye butagas stove is non-trivial: the author paid 60 LE (12 dollars) for his, plus 5 LE for the first fill, and 3 LE for each additional fill.



The most outstanding use of water heating devices for bathing in Zurayib was one family in the Zabaleen community who still uses a Kanoun (Campfire, shown above), since they live in a shanty on the edge of the city by a rock quarry with plenty of open space.

Since this family is on the edge of urban density, they also took advantage of their quasi-rural situation to build a traditional mud-brick oven for baking bread and to cultivate sugar cane, grapes, guava trees and vegetables.

(Photo: The "Mina House", i.e. Mina's shanty (far right) at the edge of the garbage dump next to the quarry. Note the guava trees and date palms to the left of the house. Behind Mina's house the concrete and brick towers of the Zabaleen informal community begin. Mina's father has been offered large sums of money for this location but refuses to abandon it saying "it offers the most beautiful view in the area, and we have all the sunshine. Here we can live in the city as though we were still in the countryside!" We call it "The Mina house" with some irony, because one of the most luxurious hotels in Cairo is the famous "Mena House" next to the Giza pyramids. Mina's house shown here is next to the quarry which looks like an inverted pyramid.)


In Darb El Ahmar the most outstanding use was by a family that uses water heated by the electric element in a washing machine!




Here are the actual numbers:

Virtually NOBODY in our sample of 456 households used solar energy, but that does not mean that nobody in these communities does -- Solar CITIES has already built and installed 8 solar hot water systems (4 in each community) and is on the way, thanks to a US AID grant of $25,000, toward building 11 more in each community (for a total of 30 this year). We chose not to include these households in our survey since the Solar CITIES initiative is new and the systems are fully subsidized. Thus they would not reflect the choice or preference patterns of the communities.