Humidity and Spores
1) Humidity
There has never been a problem with high humidity due to one of our ecosystems in a large enough space.
All buildings have humidifiers.
Club Monaco engineers thought that they could eliminate humidification in their HVAC system and save money. The ecosystem was supposed to supply ample humidity – so they thought; it never did and finally, in order to have enough humidity they had to install humidification into their HVAC system much later.
We will not be installing foggers. Misters, yes! Foggers are the only way to raise humidity very high rapidly in a space. Club Monaco had foggers but they still weren’t enough. There were spikes of high humidity when the foggers were on, the humidity dropped very rapidly as soon as the fogger were off.
Also we will be keeping the water temperature within 4° C of the air temperature. As soon as the difference is greater than 4° C, either hotter or colder, evaporation begins to happen very rapidly. Within the 4° C, virtually zero.
The only aggressive evaporation will come from the transpiration of the plants and the ceiling fans that will promote this to happen even faster. However, all of this amounts to no more than 30 persons breathing and the humidity that they would put into the air of that space.
So, I feel that from all the evidence and experience so far, there is no problem here!
Now, if we want to build in an ‘extra certainty’ safeguard; then all we need to do is to have a dehumidification system as part of the Genetron equipment that then also feeds the condensate water back into the system, saving on make-up water ( ‘RO’ water).
2) Spores & Endotoxins
In Biosphere II, spore counts went through the roof and stayed that way throughout. Also they had massive bacterial problems. Finally, Bios II had 600 times the allowable levels of nitrous-oxide.
Nitrous-oxide, basically is the fermentation of the ‘soil’ or substrate.
Precisely that; the ecosystem — the soil — was dying, fermenting and putting all kinds of pollutants into the air; to the point where any cleaning by the plants fell way behind.
So, instead of a ‘nutrient dessert’ typical of a ‘high order’ ecosystem, Bios II was a ‘low order’ dying, putrefying system that in no way could sustain life. Bios II used what I call the ‘Frankenstein Approach’ – sewing big chunks of flesh together and hoping it will live. It can not!
In our system, we let the system create its own soil – its own living flesh / skin. This is a fundamental building block of Genetron’s system and is what allows us to achieve a ‘high order’ ecosystem – a ‘nutrient dessert’ – a system that reaches out for materials / nutrients to feed itself. It is a scrubber!
Tests done at Canada Life prove that the system works far beyond the expectations of the researchers ….and Canada Life’s ecosystem is a very primitive version of what we can now achieve.
Dr. Chuck Pilger of U of T did all the spore count and endotoxin count tests for the Canada Life environment room. Unlike Bios II, spore counts were zero as well as the endotoxin counts. Outside of the room, in the rest of the building, spore counts were normal or very high … spore counts are generally high in all normal buildings—- and even higher in not so normal ones!
The reason for such a low spore count is that spores are positively charged; the ecosystem and our own bodies are highly negatively charged. The ecosystem pulls “all” of these positively charged spores, as well as all other positively charged particles out of the air — before our own bodies can do the same thing!
It isn’t less than obvious that nature would design it to be this way.
The second point is that the system is packed full of mushrooms, fungi and molds. Now, the system being ‘high order’, lets the more exotic ‘high order’ specimens thrive; these then, displace the ‘low order’ species of fungi and molds, that find it harder and harder to compete and to survive in this environment.
PS: the ‘low order’ species of fungi and molds are the ones that are harmful to us!