Cody's Algae Panel

all right everyone cody here welcome back to my laboratory so you might be able to base off the bubbling bottles behind me that i have been a bit bitten by the algae growing bug a lot of peas in a sentence it's just such an amazing organism it's able to take light just bright and water a little bit of minerals and carbon dioxide and produce food i have some chlorella here which is an edible strain of algae my too much at once there it's not exactly the most gourmet eating in the world but it is perfectly edible it's not terrible or anything i would describe its taste as being like if you took some grass and ground it up along with some walnuts or something you know it's kind of got that uh fatty protein [Music] ness but is also you know there's a lot of chlorophyll in fact my my teeth are probably going to be very green let's see if i can rinse it down a little bit now of course land plants are able to produce food from sunlight water and nutrients as well but algae beats land plants in the fact that they're just so much simpler like these land plants like this banana here it has to stand up against gravity so it produces a lot of lignin and cellulose you know structural compounds to help it stand up and that takes a lot of energy you know cellulose is just linked sugars together and you know it's also got a pump water it's going to stand up against the wind it's got all sorts of things whereas the algae just kind of floats around getting fat and in fact that fat is where oil comes from like many people might say that crude oil is dinosaur juice that's not actually true it's actually algae juice it just happens to be algae that was growing a long time ago and the earth has processed it over time into the compounds and you pump out of the whale today now fortunately for us i can process the algae and get that oil without having to wait millions of years for instance just by eating it you know the enzymes and acids in your digestive system are able to break it down and extract the oils but i find the most simple method is just to heat it up so to demonstrate this i've come outside with some algae in a test tube and i'm just going to heat it up with a blowtorch as i heat it the algae will break down into water hydrogen carbon monoxide and various other compounds which produce something similar to wood gas it is found now if we continue heating it it'll release more water and oil which will be vaporizing out okay let me see some of the oil droplets already forming condensing on the glass i'm going to try to capture some of that on a spoon here drive it off now you should be able to see the water and oil kind of separating the water is of course liquid still the oil has solidified into a kind of a waxy black substance here if i remove the water we should be able to see that it is see i just melded the oil again i heat it up first boil off the water and then start boiling the oil which catches fire there we go and of course what's left behind after that heating process is charcoal which has a number of uses not only is algae able to efficiently produce food and fuel it's also able to make oxygen that i can breathe in from the carbon dioxide that i breathe out combining that with its resiliency its fast growth and its ability to be pumped around as a fluid it's the perfect thing for project chickenhold now of course chicken whole will be using greenhouses to grow fruits and vegetables in you know that have some spice in my diet but for the bulk of the calories and stuff that i'll be feeding insects and ultimately the chickens why not algae so i'm going to need to figure out a way to grow a lot of it in a confined system closed from the atmosphere you know i can't just have an open pond and it's gotta work year round so i'm thinking something like a solar panel that drains the algae back into an insulated container at night to protect it from being frozen which also protects the panel the material for the panels uh you know it's got to be clear it's going to be able to let sunlight through it's got to be able to survive the sunlight for long periods of time it's got to be completely food safe since i plan on eating the algae [Music] the best material i can think for that is glass now the thing about glass is it's pretty expensive if i'm not buying it in bulk so i think for the first prototype i'm going to use plastic soda bottles now they're super cheap i can get them for free essentially and they are food safe and pretty resistant to sunlight so let's get a bunch of these together let's make my first algae pan i managed to acquire about 100 of these half liter soda bottles that i figure are the perfect size for this project the first task is to yank off the labels as you can see it's not too difficult and i managed to acquire quite a pile of plastic from this now the labels were stuck on with a little bit of glue which is not water soluble i ended up having to use some height proof alcohol to do it but after wiping it off with a alcohol soaked rag it ended up being crystal clear now the next step is to cut the tops and bottoms off the bottles i just used my swiss army knife for this and i only poked myself about three times and so i was left with a bunch of plastic cylinders to glue the cylinders together into longer tubes i used some aquarium sealant which is just a silicone that is safe for fish and i assume also safe for me on one end of each of the cylinders i left a little bit of the rounded portion from the top of the bottle that way they can kind of fit into each other and form a nice tight seal that holds almost without the help of the silicone once the gluing was complete i was left with nine essentially very long plastic bottles with openings at each end now i need to hook these bottles all together into one unit and for that i'm going to be using some vinyl tubing to connect between the bottles and some pvc pipe fittings once again using lots of silicone and hose clamps to make everything nice and tight because i do not want any of this to leak to join the bottles to the tubing i just put the original cap back on stuck it in and clamped it down now that of course would seal things off and make the whole thing quite useless so once the glue was cured i unscrewed the bottles and then used a drill bit to punch some holes in the cap to let the algae flow through now for this i used smaller drill bits on one end of the panel and then progressively got larger and larger holes as i went to the other end of the panel and this was just to spread the flow of the algae out more evenly otherwise the flow would be preferentially going through one tube rather than the others so once that was done i screwed the bottles back into the adapter and then prepped the pvc to be glued together to make everything one single unit so just squish those together and while that's curing i went outside and built the frame this had to be fairly strong because when running the panel would be filled with about 80 pounds of water but i couldn't make the back solid because that would trap too much heat and especially during the summer would cook the algae so i used an expanded metal mesh to let air flow through after giving it a paint job to protect it from the weather i installed the guts and everything fit quite well just minor shipping required after adding a bit more plumbing on the outside of the panel to let the algae in and out along with venting the air so that it doesn't form a vacuum and crush the bottles when the algae drains back i screwed on some clear vinyl siding which is mostly there to give a little bit more uv protection for the plastic bottles inside as well as keeping the weather off of them next using a bit more lumber i give it some legs so they could stand out in the sun this will of course also provide support for all the additional hardware that goes with the panel most notably the insulated box that will be protecting the algae from the cold for this i just used a cooler that i cut a hole in the top for the wires and added a better spigot in the side now since it's winter i covered the metal mesh with some plastic to prevent air flow just so it can build up a little bit more heat and then i started to mix up the algae media for this is mostly water a little bit of some minerals which i've mixed up i'll probably have to do another video on this particular portion and then i added the algae culture this is a true green microalgae called chlorella it's the same stuff that i ate in the beginning and ended up with about 40 liters total volume to this i put in a bubble stone and this is mostly to keep the mixture agitated so the algae doesn't all settle to the bottom of the container and sealing things up got all the tubes going in yep now to do some tests to make sure everything flows properly turn it on the algae seems to flow in quite well quite evenly amongst all of the tubes it takes about five minutes to completely fill the panel then once the algae reaches the top it begins to flow out down and back into the container now as it does so it mixes with the air and actually pulls air down with it so this is how it's going to get most of the air and therefore carbon dioxide into the algae this also agitates it to get the oxygen to come out of solution now to unplug it to make sure everything drains back okay it's not collapsing the bottles that's good now i need to make sure that everything flows out and the water doesn't plug up the panel because if it freezes at night and there's like a blockage it's going to cause a problem fortunately it all flows out just fine very little stays inside the panel at night so then i set up a timer to control the panel so that it only turns on during the day and i also did some more things like add a air filter to it to prevent contamination from you know bacteria that's floating around in the environment i also added a thermometer so i could keep track of the temperature of the algae and finally i grabbed a sample of the initial algae mixture so that i had something to compare to later incidentally this is the same process that i will be going through when i'm harvesting the algae later on so i pop the algae sample into the fridge side note i am wondering if i could use the algae to supplement mushroom blocks hey maybe mushrooms could eat it anyway after a couple of days the algae has all settled out to the bottom of the container and i'm able to pour off the clear liquid the media now having the algae removed is still perfectly usable so i put it back into the algae panel via the air intake note to self make something better for this the concentrated algae mixture was placed into some spin tubes which i put into the centrifuge to further concentrate i placed the super concentrated algae mixture out onto a dish which i put into the desiccator and once dry i scraped the algae up with a razor blade and put it on the scale to weigh out the dried biomass and here is the finished panel it's coming out of its first night which happened to be the winter solstice as you can see things are pretty frosty current temp is negative seven celsius reading right there the low last night was negative nine and the current temperature of the algae 17 celsius which is plenty warm for it it was about 26 when it shut off last night so it's lost about half a degree per hour which i think is pretty acceptable and now i'm just waiting for the pump to come back on i've got it set for it's about half an hour from now when the sun is fully up oh i hear it running aldi's in the panel very nice i see one problem though it has gotten very cloudy so even though the sun's up above the horizon it's not delivering very much energy and so the temperature is just falling like a rock that might be an issue i have to work on maybe instead of a timer i need to have like a solar panel and a relay a little solar panel that so it'll only turn on when there's enough sunlight hitting it yes that's probably one improvement since we're speaking of improvements this hose it's all very exposed and i don't like it so if i build another one of these i'll have to have that more internal that way if an animal brushes up against it it's not gonna break something so maybe it's not an ideal solution but it works see i've got a solar panel there so that whenever it's daylight it will turn on this relay which will supply power to this thermostat and as long as the temperature is above what i set this this thermostat will just let the power go straight through and the pump will be able to come on and run the panel but if it gets cold colder than this is set at then that'll turn off and the panel will start shutting down you see will that come back on yeah comes back on good so i'm going to set it at about 45 degrees fahrenheit about 8 degrees celsius that's pretty much the minimum i'd want it to run at and this is gonna be stuck up in here and of course when it gets dark the solar panel will shut off and the algae will drain back i also ended up adding a little 20 watt fish tank heater to the algae box this way it has a little bit of positive energy flow even if it's inside the box for several days yeah i'll just keep watching this take samples of algae every now and then to track its progress to see how much biomass it's able to create i'm expecting around about 10 grams a day probably less in the winter uh that's just based off of what other algae farms are able to get for a similar square area of sunlight collection now you might ask how much of my daily needs does that offset like how much of the co2 that i'm breathing out does that collect and it's about two percent so i'd probably need about 50 of these panels to produce all the calories that i need to live off of which i kind of am planning on doing but i will need to greatly simplify the design you know identify errors and fix them reduce cost and uh reduce the amount of places where algae can catch and get caught inside the panel so anyway that's all i've got for now hope you enjoyed i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cody'sLab

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Id: 64cEmjtwRgw

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2022