"Smart Kitchen"(or Permaculture Kitchen Design)

I was wondering if I could receive any input on an idea I had for a Permaculture Outdoor Kitchen Design? I have had many ideas for sometime now and could really use some help ironing down a simple first design. I would really love and appreciate any advice, input, or links for help on a few specific issues, so that I can make this a reality. The basic idea is to build an outdoor kitchen based on many permaculture ideas, such as:

1. Living Roof: The roof of the kitchen would hopefully be a garden or living roof, growing edibles (How do I build the correct living roof with wood, 20ftx14ft, structurally sound, to support the weight of the living roof w/ edibles growing in what medium?

2. Water Harvest: Excess water runoff from the roof will be harvested to be used throughout the kitchen(What could be a simple and affordable filter for the water specifically from the living roof to make it potable?)

3. Biogas: Food scraps and organic waste could hopefully feed a small biogas unit to produce a gas stove top to cook the food or boil water, as well as create fertilizer (Has anyone had experience with the Homebiogas unit?, does it really work?) http://www.homebiogas.com/

4. Grey water: Grey water irrigating the gardens surrounding the kitchen

5. Refrigeration- Hoping to implement a chest fridge adaptation to run off of a small solar set up (From my understanding I have read the adapted chest fridge has operated on 100watts per day, so I am hoping a small 100 watt PV system could potentially power it. Has anyone had experience with the adapted chest fridge's power usage?) http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html


In a nutshell, that is the basic idea. Grow it, eat it, and feed it, over and over again. I am also trying to keep this as small scale and affordable as possible. I have tried to explain permaculture many times to many people and I am hoping that when they have an opportunity to walk around and play within it, it will explain far past any of my best words.

Thank you so much for any advice, input, or thoughts

I am not sure what smart design is really, but I will give you my two cents worth.
lets start with the roof first.
It could
1) Be a place to put solar panels.
2) Be a place to collect water.
3) In the past people have used wood shingled roofs to dry apples and other fruits.
4) You could go with simple sod roof.
5) Something edible could be grown on it.

Next water collection.
1) You could direct it to kitchen.
2) You can collect it higher up the spout and run it away from house to a garden.
3) You can use non-potable water to flush toilet, no water treatment really needed.

Bio-gas
1) Assuming you have good organic source in large enough volume, you can heat with it.
2) Again if you can generate enough you may be able to cook with it.

Instead of starting with your technology, I would start with functionality.
There was a couple of great articles about how modern American kitchens really do not meet the needs of different ethnic cultures.
This is why you are now seeing wok kitchens being added to some new homes. It can be as simple as not place to store very large pans that are used.
What is your food culture.
Next what is your social culture.
Does your family gather in the kitchen? Do you have several people working in the kitchen at the same time.
The cultural trend for mainstream America is to eat more meals alone.

So start with what you do in your ideal kitchen and what is needed to do those things. Than work backwards considering functionality, appeal, etc.
How much room do you need for each function?
Do you need a pantry, a root cellar, a fermenting room, a place to butcher small livestock.

Finally, examine alternative to meet what you have identified. Electric, gas, propane, wood, bio-gas, etc. for a stove is just one example.

Kanulaf, outdoor kitchens are great, but I agree with alex that you should evaluate your ultimate functional goals that you would like the kitchen to fulfill. Here are some questions to consider:

-- Do you have an existing kitchen that serves your food-preparations needs? If so, what do you hope to gain from an outdoor kitchen that you don't already have?

-- How many people will you regularly cook for? (this has bearings on biogas generation)

-- How much land/area do you have to work with? A 20'x14' kitchen is pretty large, unless you are cooking & serving a lot of people. If you have enough land that is suitable to growing, then I would steer you away from a green roof. They are relatively labor and resource intensive (for structural support and waterproofing, though recycled materials can be used), and your efforts would be better spent on a ground-level garden.

-- What region do you live in? I am writing from the northeast US where our outdoor kitchen is limited to 4-5 months out of the year.

-- I have a chest freezer converted to a refrigerator and running on solar...it works great. The amount of power consumed will greatly depend on where you are living and the seasons. Ours doesn't have to click on from November through March! The rest of the time it is running as part of our 500W solar system that provides lights, charging & food prep for our home. If you are in a very warm place be sure to incorporate additional insulation.

If you answer some of these questions we can help you out a little more with your project.

As for using a outdoor kitchen only so many months out of the year.
I remember cooking a turkey in a weber pot with some friends for Chistmas in Alaska outdoors (that event is a very interesting story).
The main issue with a outdoor kitchen is water freezing up.
If you create a mason oven with enough mass you can use it in the dead of winter.
It is just that it will take more fuel to get the oven to operating temperature and keep it there. But that is what is great about mason and any mass heating arrangement, it retains heat.

I would use the roof for solar and use the runoff for things like toilet flushing and garden watering. Divert your kitchen greywater into the garden watering. During hot weather when you don't want to heat your primary living space up, outdoor kitchens are wonderful. Just have varmit proofing of your food stock and/or be consigned to carrying the stuff in and out unless you have or make a passdoor or window to send stuff back and forth as needed. Superinsulating can help with very very low energy refrigeration. If you have protection (roof or awning) you can cook outside at almost any time of year even in bad weather (grilling in a snowbank at 6500 feet with a gas grill is possible)

I like the idea of an outdoor kitchen in my area. Summers are just too hot to cook in the house. I used to regularly cook outside in the winter in Alaska when it was down to about 20 below though, so it's still possible in cold weather. (Frying potatoes for 12 or 13 people in the house took to long, I had a couple of huge frying pans and a propane double burner and could get everyone fed with about 10 minutes on the heat outside apposed to over an hour inside).

Suggestion 1:
An outdoor kitchen may not need a lot of walls, but how about a wall of vertical pvc tubes with cutouts and filled with compost so that your wall becomes a wall of greens, etc. You could set up a watering trough on the top to distribute water to all the tubes, making watering easier. The tubes could be spaced to allow good air movement and would warm up quickly in the spring (maybe paint them black or dark green). I've seen videos of people using the vertical tubes in greenhouses, but for me, making it part of an outdoor kitchen makes the idea a lot more attractive. I like the idea of just grabbing my vegies off of the kitchen wall.

I think gardening on the roof, although undeniably cool (both figuratively and literally), can be impractical (heavy roof, problems getting up and down) and might be more work than it's worth. Outdoor kitchens are usually fairly lightweight affairs.

Suggestion 2:
One way to use the roof might be a raised window box affair along the bottom of the roof with some sprawler like sweet potatoes or melons which could be encouraged to grow on the very slightly slanted roof. Could be planted in the tops of the tubes also. I can visualize a potentially humorous or horrifying scenario involving a 40 bound watermelon rolling of a roof, so the idea may need some analyzing. Maybe some bars along the edge of the roof to keep what's over your head from falling onto your head. Vines like sweet potatoes growing down from the roof would be a pleasant screen.

Suggestion 3:
You could also have a big pot you that goes in the center of a round roof (with maybe a little roof above that to keep the weather out, or the pot bigger than the hole to keep rain out of your kitchen and you guide the young vines onto the roof) that would allow the melons, etc to naturally take over the roof. Water in the center, harvest with a long handled rake or hoe, after harvest cut the vines at the pot and rake them off the roof. That would allow a pretty light roof, allow many of the advantages of a green roof and recover the otherwise wasted space of the roof.

You could also have a series of highly raised beds doing the same thing down the center ridge of a rectangular roof.

for all three suggestions, watering would probably be a daily affair. It wouldn't be too bad if you have pressurized water, you could run some small pvc tubes that would allow either a drip system or just turn the faucet on once a day. If you're hauling water, things become more work, but if your hauling water you definitely already know that.

I visited the house in Crestone Colorado. On the north wall of the kitchen he had built in a refrigerator. The house was made out of Adobe in the refrigerator was simply a highly insulated box with the swing door. There was an air intake on the top of the back of the refrigerator going out the north wall that would draw the cold air in to the refrigerator. He use that for the winter months for his refrigerator and it use no power whatsoever. Somewhere I have a photo of it. I'll try to find it and post it in this forum.

someone just reminded me about a important issue with outdoor kitchen.
That is ability to control wind and drafts.
You see my friend does alot of canning.
They setup portable gas burners in a outdoor kitchen to run a handful of American canners at the same time.
These monsters are great for pressure cannning.
However, if you have drafts you can have issues with maintaining a steady temperature.
So my friend has the ability to put up tarps to block the wind while still allowing air flow so you do not fall over from the heat.
There are many approaches to putting up wind blocks and creating a stable area temperature.
I you do water bath canning this is not a big issue because so long as you can keep the water boiling you have a stable temperatue, you just boil water off faster.

the right answers to your questions all depend on your situation. Green roof plus rainwater collection could work in an area with quite a bit of rainfall, but the roof itself will use up a lot of the water thru the plants and evaporation, so in small rain events, none will leave the roof. the roof would need to be low slope and have some built in soil retaining features. careful thought would need to be given to how to access the roof. i envision as a first thought for this size of roof a gable roof supported on 9 posts, at least 4x6 and cross braced, a double 2x12 ridge, double 2x10 beams on long sides of perimeter and 2x10 rafters with 16" spacing and 3/4" plywood or osb sheathing. then maybe 9" rise over the seven feet of run from eave to ridge. there are expensive and cheap ways to waterproof a green roof. a cheap way i did on my outhouse was a coat of roofing tar(that's a more expensive part at around $20/gallon) on the scavenged 3/4" plywood the tide brought in one day , a layer of tar paper, and a layer of 6 mil polyethylene sheeting. still here you need some way to keep this sliding off, like near horizontal 2x4s fastened to the roof deck. If you only want 4" of dirt or so, it would not need to be as beefy as i have described. there are several span calculators online, so you can calculate your live loads (how many people do you expect to be on the roof at once and what snow loads can you expect for your location?) and dead loads (how deep do you want your soil to be? you could use the weight of water to get a close estimate, since the soil could at times be fairly saturated.) You would figure the volume of your roof as depth x area then multiply by the weight per volume of water. I'm not an engineer, so check it out yourself, but just some ideas on how to plan for making the dream a reality.
btw i lived the better part of a couple of winters with an outdoor kitchen in alaska. sometimes a storm would blow snow in and cover everything. i tried to wash the dishes fast. i cooked meals all in one pot and ate inside, and kept my 5 gallon bucket of water inside. It was great in summer having the close contact with the plants and animals all around the kitchen. that cabin was 8x16 and kitchen was 8x10 and it felt plenty big for me living alone.

This seems an interesting idea! To combine everything in a kitchen design, from start till ... start all over again and again ...
Maybe it isn't because you 'need' this, but you want this dream to become true. I have dreams like that too. Asking advice, brainstorming together in this forum can give you some more ideas.

My advice: take baby steps, don't just make a design and then finish it all, but start with one part (the main part) and add more when needed / when possible. You can always make small (or larger) changes ...
I hope you can 'live your dream' in the future. All of you

Kanulaf Zuk wrote:
1. Living Roof: The roof of the kitchen would hopefully be a garden or living roof, growing edibles (How do I build the correct living roof with wood, 20ftx14ft, structurally sound, to support the weight of the living roof w/ edibles growing in what medium?

2. Water Harvest: Excess water runoff from the roof will be harvested to be used throughout the kitchen(What could be a simple and affordable filter for the water specifically from the living roof to make it potable?)

3. Biogas: Food scraps and organic waste could hopefully feed a small biogas unit to produce a gas stove top to cook the food or boil water, as well as create fertilizer (Has anyone had experience with the Homebiogas unit?, does it really work?) http://www.homebiogas.com/

4. Grey water: Grey water irrigating the gardens surrounding the kitchen

5. Refrigeration- Hoping to implement a chest fridge adaptation to run off of a small solar set up (From my understanding I have read the adapted chest fridge has operated on 100watts per day, so I am hoping a small 100 watt PV system could potentially power it. Has anyone had experience with the adapted chest fridge's power usage?) http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html

Our thoughts reading this was that 1 & 2 don't go well together. Runoff from your living roof is going to have high TDS (total dissolved solids...think organic matter, brown staining from tannins, etc). It's less efficient to try to filter this than to just separate your rainwater catchment from your living roof.

Also, like already mentioned, having your edibles on the roof makes for more work in harvesting. Long season crops of the plant-it-and-forget-it sort would be ideal for that situation so you aren't having to get up there often - not only will it be work climbing a ladder (or even staircase) to tend and harvest but you're putting undue wear and tear on whatever waterproofing membrane you use by walking around on it.

I love Mick's idea of the living wall with vertical PVC - this helps solve two issues simultaneously (drafts and edibles-as-part-of-structure) in an elegant way, which is always the sign of genius at work

For #5, you'll want to review the solar requirements carefully to see what the plausibility looks like. Granted, you can get away with a pretty small system for a chest freezer conversion but you're still looking at a) battery bank, b) powerful enough inverter to handle compressor startup surge, c) needing to run day and night, especially during hot weather (how hot depends on where you live), as well as during stretches of cloudy skies that can last upwards of 5 days (depending on where you live) and d) likely more than 100Wh/day total usage even in an ideal climate. Appropriate technology is great but never let it fool you - it's still technology and it can still get more complicated, and costly, than it *should* be

It's a great idea for a demonstration of permaculture design application and can definitely be done, but picking the techniques and technologies before identifying the requirements, functions and constraints is equivalent to putting the horses before the cart and will lead to a system that requires more work than it worth, produces (that dirty word) "waste" and, inevitably, fails to thrive. I wont say "back to drawing board" but it'd be worth going back to the basics to review the intent before making decisions on how to solve issues and make this thing a reality

Wow, thank you so much everyone, such great input and now Im excited for the great deal homework I have ahead of me. Just wanted take a moment to attempt to answer some quick questions from some of the responses.

I enjoy understanding ultimate functional goals for a design, so I'll try to begin there.

My ultimate functional goal is to improve the relationships around me.

My current indoor kitchen is intended to feed a family of 4 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, U.S. Unfortunately, it is small, inefficient, and wasteful, and cannot contain my family of 4, at once, comfortably. Both me and my wife work away from home, so cooking after work is a challenge to enjoy while attempting to enjoy time at home as a family. An outdoor kitchen/dining space(14ftx16ft), could be designed for how we specifically work together while making it possible for us to enjoy watching our children play in our small yard, or helping to obtain and tend to the food in the garden. I appreciate the opportunity for the design to also educate my children from interaction, rather than my instruction, as it will leave me with more time to simply just enjoy "them". I understand the living roof Garden may not be practical for me at this moment, since I do currently have garden space. The Garden Roof was more of a hope for others around me to physically see, in order to assist the understanding that even in an urban environment here, where space is limited, solutions do exist. Maybe in time.

I really believe that a kitchen/garden can come very close to becoming a closed loop system, limit my energy bills, limit the strain on public sewer systems, and enhance my overall experience in general.

And I cannot thank everyone enough for your thoughts, input and advice, I have a lot more work ahead of me and really appreciate your gifts, thanks soo much.

My apologies just wanted to clear up Smart Kitchen too

Simply Made and Resourcefully Thoughtful

Kanulaf Zuk,

Look into RGGS garden system, if you are in a highly urban area with not much space. It isn't exactly permaculture, and will take some work, but in the end it's a containerized self watering gardening system that allows you to grow lots in little space. They have a wonderful facebook presence. Look up Larry Hall, in Minnesota. It combines the self watering with some aspects of Square Foot Gardening, and will give you the ability to tailor something to the space you have. Once set up it does cut the work way down. You being in major urban will be able source used 5 gallon pails that had foodstuff packed in them from restaurants at least (one of the major components). Here's a link to one of his youtube posts www.youtube.com/user/larrylhall

Good luck with your project. I can say that this year I'm planting a bunch of my peppers into pails and will be able to take some pails and convert those into self watering planters so I can take them indoors for the winter and continue to get them to produce and bring them out the next summer. Peppers are perennial in warm enough climates, and it is easy to get one to grow for 5-6 years.

Kanulaf, do you intend to use this year round or just in the comfortable months? Are you worried about bugs getting into the kitchen or is an open air concept acceptable? What is your rough budget for the project? Knowing that could help narrow the solutions.

I love the idea of a showcase kitchen for others in the region. One thing to think about is that you may not want to create such a fancy system that the people seeing it get overwhelmed with the gizmos. If I was on a tour of a $30K permaculture kitchen I may not "see and internalize" all the things that I could do at home for $200.

My initial impression of an outdoor permie kitchen would be a structure that is made from recycled materials (windows, pallets, urbanite). It uses a solar cooker, cob oven, wood heat or maybe biogas to cook with. If time after work is the issue, I'm not sure how you cook quickly without gas or electric.... I'd probably skip the living roof but definitely trellis arctic kiwis, grapes or other food along the roof edge. Build planters into every nook of the exterior you can with the gutters providing the water. If you do install a garden then add rain barrels and use grey water to water them. Build in a compost collection system. The solar powered fridge sounds good (but I know nothing of how they work). Maybe put a root cellar under the floor. I'd try to go out of my way to make the technological elements look homemade/DIY/doable versus high-tech/fancy/expensive if this is going to be a showcase.

The city may have some rules on what you can and can't build as well

How thy did it at the Bremerton City Nursery
Drip irrigated half barrels on the edge of the roof and in the background on the ridge of a roof. As already suggested with a clear plastic roof winter squash vines could gradually cover the roof for shade in late summer but allow light and warmth to enter during the colder months. Removable walls of the same roofing and screens would also allow for seasonal adaptation. It could be a sun room kitchen in the fall/winter. A potting/greenhouse kitchen in the spring. Then a shaded screen porch kitchen in the summer.

As I follow this thread there are many good ideas. So many ideas that it is unlikely you can do all of them in one kitchen.
As the thread develops so do posters ideas of their ideal kitchen. This being the case in life, You may wish to design for change.

This means you identify what would be easy to modify year to year and what would be hard to modify once you have built your kitchen. For example, cabinet doors are not too hard to change. But making changes to the roof can be hard and expensive, so make sure on your roof design for the long run.

Next identify what is likely to change a lot, what is likely to change over time, etc.
Cooking utensils tend to change as new technologies and products come out. Appliances wear out over time. Furniture get old and has to be replaced sometimes. The food we eat and the containers it comes in changes over time. You may have seasonality issues with need to change based on local availability.
All the above and many more things can impact the layout of your kitchen.
So design the ability to change into your plan, and look for areas that are highly likely to change and make them adaptable to change.

An outdoor kitchen is something I want to build for myself soon. I have put a lot of thought into it, but for me it will likely be a bit different since I am in Florida and only need to feed myself and maybe a few guests on occasion. Since you mention being in PA, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is a rocket mass heater. I'm sure there are numerous ways the structure around it can be built, but it won't be much fun going outside on a cold rainy or snowy evening, especially after coming home from work. Without adequate heat it will likely be abandoned in the winter. A rocket mass heater can be used to both heat the space as well as to do some cooking.

I also agree that some things may or may not be particularly useful together. As previously described, the rainwater catchment vs living roof issue. You may want to set up an area next to the kitchen with solar panels and some rainwater collection or use another area like runoff from the roof of the house. The biogas digester seems a bit complicated. I'm certain people can make this work, but I personally wouldn't use one for cooking food when ample amounts of wood are available. I have played around with a few prototypes of rocket stoves that were clean burning and fuel efficient. The stoves were easy to build and I just have to provide fuel and heat to get it going. It's pretty hard to mess it up whereas I could easily see something going wrong with a biogas digester and ruining your outdoor cooking plans for the evening (or longer). It would be one thing if it was a demonstration site where people were paying to see things like this in action, but it is a different story if you want something to simply work on a daily basis.

Getting the structure built and sized appropriately will be the first goal for my outdoor kitchen. Once I have a roof and adequate protection from weather I can work on stoves and ovens. I really like the idea of a rocket mass oven. It is similar to a cob oven but with a rocket stove heating the mass. I have seen a few that were made with the fire going directly into the oven, such as at This Site with a Rocket Kitchen. I also want to build one with the exhaust separate from the interior of the oven. Something I can fire up and get a weeks worth of cooking done with while enjoying the outdoors. In my case, I don't want to heat my living space up. It is pretty insane to me how houses here are designed like solar ovens, and people cook inside their homes with their roof radiating heat into their house and running huge A/C systems to combat poor design.

Keeping the refrigeration well insulated and away from the sun and the stoves or other heat sources will help it to be more energy efficient. I personally am looking to go solar with a chest freezer. I am going to build a small platform to lift it off the ground a bit to make it easier to reach the bottom. I have a chest freezer at my current place and I left a blanket on top of it one afternoon. It was ice cold underneath it when I moved it that night. There is a lot of efficiency that can be gained from additional insulation. I also added some styrofoam that came with some packaging across the bottom of the freezer to minimize losses. You have to look at the type of unit you are using to determine where it can be insulated.

Some of the off-grid based freezers seem prohibitively expensive. I am going to just invest in an A/C unit with an inverter, a few panels, and batteries. The batteries need to be able to carry it through the longest amounts of cloudy days you get and the panels need to be able to charge it up enough to carry you through such an event. It is always a good idea to oversize things when powering refrigeration. Making short runs for the wiring and oversizing the cables will ensure you don't have significant voltage drop.

What a great idea! I've been thinking about an outdoor kitchen as well as the summer heat moves in. Dom't forget to think about critter proofing as well in your design considerations.

Once you get your kitchen set up, please please put it on the Solar Tour that PennFuture runs in October so others can be inspred as well. http://my.pennfuture.org/site/Calendar?id=113541&view=Detail