Location will preferably be within 10 miles of a river or ocean to allow for fishing once the immediate danger has passed. Preferably freshwater stream for fishing, and ocean to allow for collection of sea-salt as a preservative.

All the infrastructure will be contained beneath the top tier, Tier 6. Access is through the larder in The Castle.



The internals of the top tier have been divided into two sections. Each is 758 feet square and 20 feet high. There are 5 foot diameter columns every 40 feet.

This means that the top tier internal walls are 20 feet thick. This is to achieve stability and security.

The three utilities, water, power and sewage will be distributed on these sections. The upper section will have the power, irrigation and final stages of the sewage system. The lower section will have the water wells and pumps, and the initial stages of the sewage treatment. Adequate partitioning systems will keep the waste from the wells, and the liquid from the electricity.

Water

There will be two wells for water underneath the top tier. They will each have an electrically driven pump (two complete spares, plus hand crank). The tanks, pumps and other equipment will be sited below The Castle and accessed through the larder. The space beneath the top tier is just under 23 million cubic feet, which is enough for almost 651 million litres (143 million UK gallons, 171 million US gallons) even allowing half a million cubic feet for the pumping equipment. I'm not saying that all that will be used, just that water storage will not be an issue.

Water quality, on the other hand, will. Most of the water on the islands is quite brackish and hard. This will mean that filters will be needed, and have to be changed and maintained. Whilst the system will be as automatic as possible, I have yet to ascertain any kind of time-frames for this. Filtering seawater is quite a routine thing in the Caribbean, and they go from saltwater to the lowest EC freshwater easily. Filters may be the one thing that will need to be scavenged from the island desalination plant on Z day. Since the entire water system is (to all intents and purposes) underground, it will be a membrane system rather than a sunlight system.

A great link was put up recently (kudos ValNTine) for Rain Catchers. I will be looking into this more to see if it can be cost effective in a place such as my BOL. I have a feeling that the average rainfall there might not be enough to warrant the installation.

Power

Electricity will come from 4 sources. Solar panels on the roof will be the primary supply. The Grid will be the secondary supplier until it dies. Propane will be a supplementary supply until the tanks run dry (the CO2 by-product will be piped to the greenhouse to increase plant growth) and a gasoline generator will be the emergency supply.

The smaller houses will have solar panels, and a connection to the Grid.

The power will be prioritised, and distributed according to availability. All power, from the solar panels, the generators and the Grid, will flow to a central location for redistribution. If the link to the distribution board is severed, then the priorities will be followed as best they can.



Each distribution box will be able to make decisions on power flow, based on the priorities shown. For example, if the Grid goes offline and there is limited solar energy, the house distribution will pass all the power from the panels to the Central until it is told that priority 4 is fulfilled. As long as that condition remains true, it will use whatever power it has left for priority 5. If there is surplus after that, it will allow Central to take it until priority 6 is fulfilled. And so on.

Whilst each Distriubtion box could be seen as a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) there would in reality be two independent links between each bank of two load-balanced, redundant distributors. For complete link failure, both conduits (the arrows) would need to be broken, or both distributors within a load-balanced bank.

Each distribution box (db) will have an array of batteries and capacitors (storage). The db will funnel excess power into storage until it is full, and access it to fulfill requests from each tier. The levels can be adjusted depending on the predicted supply. For example, if there is expected to be a storm that will darken the skies for a few days, and solar is the only power left, you can set the storage to only be used for priority 7 or higher. If the dark period is set to last longer, you might decide to set it to 4. Note: It will always supply priority 2.

For reference, The Castle has over 25,000 square feet of roof available for solar panelling. Assuming low efficiency panels (50 milliwatts(mW) per square inch) and 5 hours of peak sunlight per day, that's still 180,000,000 mW-hours per day, or 180kWh per day. Typical home usage is 25kWh. So I could lose 80% of the panels and still have all the home appliances functioning normally. However, most of the equipment for working the land is going to be electrical, to ease the transition for everyone from sedentary life to farming. The noise might attract zombies, if they make it to the island, but since I have chosen a low population island the risk should be minimal. Once the electric machines become irreparably damaged, then hand tools will be used.

Waste treatment

Sinks and drains are classed as grey-water. Toilets as black-water. Both require some treatment before they can be used as fertilizer and passed into the irrigation system.The grey-water will need less treatment than the black-water, due to the increased virus and bacteria content of black-water.

Typically, the first stage is to remove the non-organic solids. This is done by letting the water stand, so the grit and other solids fall to the bottom, and skimming the top. This can then be incinerated, and the resultant ash deposited outside the base. Organic matter is then treated to kill viruses and bacteria before being liquidised and added to the irrigation system. This should save on chemical fertiliser, since rotting organic matter is high in N-P-K. Since all the water is being treated and then spread on the crops, therefore things like garbage disposals in the sinks can be used instead of having to compost food waste, making the recycling a lot less dependent on people separating out items, and a lot more pleasant to deal with.

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