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Three Panel Design: All 20”x 30”

Panel 1 - Hexayurts for Burning Man

Hexayurts really enhance the Burning Man experience. You get two or even three hours a day more sleep. You have a cool place to hide out mid-afternoon. You have a warm place to party at 4AM. It rocks.

That boiling early morning? You sleep right through it. At 9AM when most tents are uninhabitable solar cookers, a hexayurt is blissfully cool and dark. Sometime around 11AM, maybe you wake up, mist the hexayurt down to cool it off and doze for another fifteen minutes, then get up fresh and ready for another wonderful day. On the Playa this is pretty much life-changing because it means that by the end of the week, you're still fresh and sharp and ready to have fun. Your gear is dust free, and you feel great. It's like extending your Burn by two days every year.

Because you build a hexayurt yourself or with your friends, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you made your own shelter. It is creative and very participatory. By building a hexayurt you're joining a community of engineers and creators who are helping to transform the planet, as you will see on the other information boards.

Hexayurts are not just for the playa, hexayurts are for the world.

The basic instructions are super simple.

1. Buy 240 yards of wide bidirectional filament tape, like 3M 8959 for example.

• Total cost: $40 or more. Shop around and look for bargains.

2. Buy 12 sheets of a suitable 4' x 8' building material, like Thermax or Tuff-R, from your local building supply store.

• Total cost: $200 - $400.

3. Using a craft knife, cut six of those sheets in half along the diagonal, three from right to left, three from left to right.

• Total labor: less than an hour.

4. Tape the edges of each board to protect the playa from moop, and yourself from sharp edges and stray fibers.

• Total labor: two or three hours, or far less with three people and practice.

5. Tape the building together by forming the roof from the triangles, and the walls from the six boards you did not cut.

• Total labor: two or three people for about an hour.

This is easy. You can do this. If we were working with index cards and sticky tape, you could make one right now on your desk. You know how this works now. You can do this.

There are details you will have to get right to make sure the building stands on the Playa but all playa projects have details, and there are lots of pictures, instructions and videos online to help you.

Why is the Hexayurt cool and dust-free? The Hexayurt is dust free because, once it is securely staked down and taped to a tarp, it is basically air tight.

The outside is silver, so it reflects away sunlight. You may want to bring some paint or other material to Burning Man to matt the surface if you wind up located in a position where the reflected light and heat is causing problems. Also, the material itself is an insulator. Thermax has an R-value (insulation value) of 6.5 per inch, and is used as an insulation product in all kinds of buildings. Between the insulating foam and the reflective surface, very little heat enters a closed Hexayurt.

The ground is always at around 58F at a depth of six or more feet. If you shade an area for a day or two, the surface of the earth settles towards that temperature. So the floor of the Hexayurt gets cool, and stays cool, and tends to suck the heat out of the air inside making you feel cool. For maximum cooling in the day time, keep the floor of the Hexayurt free from insulating materials like blankets and cushions. For maximum warmth at night, cover the floor of the Hexayurt with blankets.

Finally, the greatest trick for the playa is to take a little spray bottle (or, better still, a pump up one gallon garden sprayer,) close all the doors and windows, and spray high into the air in your yurt. The evaporation of the mist rapidly cools the air of the Hexayurt. If you spray for a minute or two you can get shivering cold in the middle of the day!

The air inside the hexayurt now has a very high humidity, and on the Playa that can be very nice. But slowly the air begins to warm up again as heat re-enters the building. So instead of being dry and hot, you are now damp and hot. Usually this takes 10 or 20 minutes. So, open a door or a window and let out the warm, moist air, let in the hot, dry air, and then close the window and spray again. Usually you have to do this every fifteen minutes to half an hour, and it takes about a half a cup per cycle. You could also go deluxe and get a solar powered swamp cooler, but the sprayer is very simple and lots of fun in practice.

I have spent entire days sitting in the hexayurt doing this with friends; having people come in, sit down, drink some water, take their shoes off, cool down for a while and then go about their day. It is a really fun way of making a space to get to know people on the playa, and offering them something they need and enjoy.

Panel Two - How To Build A Hexayurt

( ADD ALL THE CUTTING PLANS/ASSEMBLY IMAGES)

All hexayurts cut neatly from 4' x 8' sheets, the standard size for most construction goods.

The large sizes require only one kind of cut - diagonal cutting straight across six boards to form the roof triangles. Six 4'x8' boards are cut along the diagonal, three right-to-left, and three left-to-right. From these twelve right-angled triangles, six isosceles triangles are formed, making the roof cone. The vertical walls are formed from whole 4'x8' sheets.

The smaller sizes require a somewhat more complex cutting pattern for efficiency but all details are below.

If you are cutting angles:

• the angle between vertical boards and other vertical boards at the corners is 60° so you cut 30° on each edge.
• the angle between the vertical boards and the roof is also 60°.
• the angle between the boards on the roof cone is 29.5° so you might as well cut a 15° angle on each board.
• all boards which meet flat should have no angle cut on them at all, of course.

Angle cutting is not required for a perfectly good hexayurt of any size, as long as one is using wide enough tape. 3" will do, 6" is better.

Panel Three - Living Off The Grid

Got some land in the backcountry? Want a cheap guesthouse for the back yard? With a few simple modifications, a hexayurt can be a comfortable home, with all the main features of your current home—for about the cost of a laptop.

Overview

Imagine your house. Think about all the pipes and wires that go in and out carrying utilities like water, electrical power, natural gas, and sewage.

A hexayurt needs those services to be a home, but we do not want to bring all the pipes and wires with us! Let's see a new way of providing those utilities, called "distributed infrastructure."

Electricity: Hexayurt-style solar

Hexayurt solar is based around rechargeable AA batteries. Battery technology has improved a lot in the last few years, and solar panels have gotten a lot cheaper.

If you are providing for just a single household, consider one or two solar-powered AA battery chargers. They vary a lot in price and quality, so be sure to shop around. If you have a whole village of hexayurts, you can also make a "power pillar."

A power pillar is a large solar panel connected to a fast AA battery charger. A typical set up would be an 80W panel (about $400) and directly connected to a 12V 15 minute battery charger. This is a walk-up charging station, where you take your empty NIMH batteries, drop them into the charger, wait 15 minutes, then take your freshly charged batteries home. Assuming a 10 hour charging day, that charges 40 sets of batteries.

Appliances you can run this way include:

• anything that runs off USB power (using a USB battery box, about $10.)
• lighting: LED headlamps, etc. CCFL lanterns are particularly good and efficient (about $10-20.)
• communication: cell phone chargers, GMRS and FRS type radios, other battery powered radios etc.
• entertainment: pretty much any general purpose device can be found in a AA configuration, like televisions.
• wood gasification stove (see below.)

Laptops can be charged by connecting them directly to the big solar panel when you need to charge them, if you have a car charger. Check with somebody who knows solar systems before you do this with your laptop, just in case!

Hexayurt solar is a really cheap, easy and simple way to do basic services using the sun. It's not as efficient in terms of dollars-per-watt as a big household solar system would be but it is very cheap to buy up-front, and provides durable power for all your basic needs.

Natural Gas: the Wood Gasification Stove

For cooking and heating, instead of natural gas coming through pipes to your house, or big tanks of propane, we use a wood gasification stove.

Wood gasification stoves use really advanced combustion science to get every last drop of energy out of your fuel. They burn ordinary wood - twigs or scrap lumber, firewood, kindling, even sawdust. For their size, they put out an amazing amount of heat. The stoves are very simple, comprising of only a few pieces of sheet metal and a little electrical fan that provides the special air flow that makes the stove so efficient.

Two AA batteries power the fan for ten hours of cooking, with a peak heat output of 3kW, which is about the same amount of heat that the largest burner on a household stove puts out. Wood gasification stoves are low emission and very efficent because the gases are burned as fuel as is the left over charcoal. Fuel is burned ten times more efficiently than an open fire, and about three times more efficiently than in other stoves.

These stoves are about $50 commercially, but in the developing world they could cost as little as $10-20.

(See also the Mechabolic display elsewhere in the Green Man Pavilion for a more involved explanation of gasification ).

Water: Solar Water Pasteurization

Most of the places where people live already have some way of getting water. Sometimes the water is far away and has to be transported, but most of the time the problem is that the water you have access to is not drinkable and needs to be purified. Old wells, mountain streams, questionable water tanks, for instance.

One of the approaches we really like is solar water pasteurization. SODIS, as it is sometimes called, is particularly well suited to sunny areas. It works like this. Water is heated by the sun to 160F for six hours. The heat kills essentially all disease organisms, leaving water safe to drink in nice, sterile containers (because the containers are purified by the heat too.) The water may still have bad chemicals or bad flavor but it will not give you diseases.

The simplest form of SODIS is filling bottles with river or well water and leaving them in the sun all day. In many areas of the world, that is all it takes to purify drinking water. In less sunny areas more technological SODIS systems are required, involving things like solar collector panels and insulated storage tanks. But in many places, SODIS is essentially free and very safe. There are other approaches, like the Potters for Peace Filtron ceramic purifiers, which are also very well suited to purifying water anywhere on the planet.

Sewage:Composting Toilets

A composting toilet is like a porta-potty that hardly ever needs to be emptied, contains no toxic chemicals, but instead uses microbes that aid in the decomposition of waste. Composting toilets transform human waste into an absolutely safe and non-smelly fertilizer which can be used for non-food crops. There are lots of different ways to build a composting toilet, some public domain and some commercial. The very cheapest approaches cost around $20 per toilet, up to fancy commercial systems which look and work almost exactly like a regular toilet, and cost over $1000. Deluxe!

Putting it all together

What you have when you take a hexayurt or other simple building systems and add these essential services is an autonomous building - a home that can work without heavy and expensive external systems like the power grid or the sewage treatment plant down the road. This gives you a lot of freedom to live your own dreams. For some other people, and we'll come to them in the next panel, it can change their lives and even save them.

Panel Four - Transforming the World

Hexayurts for the very poor

A reasonable $200 house that comes with a little electricity, a stove, a water purifier and a toilet is life changing all over the world.

There are around one billion people in the world who live on less than $2 per day. A billion people live in slums. Nearly half of the population of the world lives in small agricultural villages, many of them living in conditions essentially unchanged from a thousand years ago. Some of these people probably want hexayurts.

The hexayurt and the utilities package like the wood gasification stove are offered to the world. If people like them, and choose to use them, they should spread just like cell phones have - one person at a time. To encourage this spread, the hexayurt is public domain and free for any use. Anybody can manufacture them even as a business. We think that a good hexayurt can be made for $100, in bulk, and the utilities package for another $100. That's the cheapest house we know how to build.

One of the core challenges of the 21st century is applying our advanced science and technology to making life better for very poor people. Things like vaccines for common diseases, or malaria nets, can revolutionize life for a poor person for very little money.

Hexayurts for refugees

Making homes for people who have lost everything is our biggest challenge. Refugees flee from their homes with nothing but their lives and come into a new, barren world not unlike the Playa itself in many cases. There may be a little more water and a few trees, but they seldom get good land to settle down and start their new lives on. They need all the help we can give them.

So we start with housing. Good, strong, sturdy buildings that are made to last for the 10 to 20 years that most refugees are "homeless" for. We prefer to think of refugees as "starting over" rather than "homeless." They have a home: right here.

Then we add good, high quality, cheap services. The little solar panels, one per few dozen homes. A good set of basic educational materials for children and adults a like, directly printed on each hexayurt building panel. Those who can read can teach the material on the buildings, and also teach others to read. The materials will focus on agriculture and health, on basic knowledge of science and engineering issues, like crop rotation and well digging, that can help people improve their lives. Stoves, water purifiers, and composting toilets round out the package.

When the time finally comes for people to go home, the hexayurts and everything else are packed up on to trucks and moved with the people so that they do not lose their homes again.

We are many years of testing and development away from being able to use this new approach in real refugee situations. But just the ideas can help improve current practice, and some technologies, like the wood gasification stoves, or the hexayurt-style solar lighting systems can be incorporated into current refugee situations. Positive change can happen one piece at a time.

Hexayurts for disasters in America

We need a national effort to learn from Hurricane Katrina. Part of what could come out of this is a new approach to disaster response in America, something much more centered around community preparedness. Here's how one small part of it might work.

Imagine there was a volunteer list, people from all over America who would help to resettle refugees from another Katrina. You would sign up for this list if you were willing and able to help somebody in need in a crisis. Now imagine a second volunteer group. This second group is people who know how to build hexayurts or similar structures, and are willing to work around the clock in a disaster. In this role, you load what you need into the back of your vehicle and drive close to where the trouble is when you get the call. Local building supply stores pull materials from their stores all over the country so there is plenty to build with. Finally, a computer system does the matching: a host family is paired with a refugee family, building materials are matched with an available building team. The building team delivers the new shelter to the host family before the refugees arrive. It is basically like adding a guest room to your back yard to house the people who lost their homes for a few weeks until some proper permanent arrangements are made.

Because hexayurts are so easy to build, 10,000 building teams could shelter something like one million families in about three days. People can be trained on the job very quickly so the building efforts gain speed, and materials flow in from a wider and wider area.

This idea has a strong recommendation from the American Red Cross, and is being considered by the Expedient Infrastructure for Transitory Populations project.