Transforming A School Bus Into A Lab For Sustainable Living

A few months ago, Felicia Ballos and Ray Roy were faced with several major life challenges, namely: the birth of their first child Bowie and dealing with difficult New York living conditions. Opting for more sustainable and mobile living conditions, Ray and Felicia have turned a school bus into a multipurpose home, movie theater, and performance venue. However, their journey, which they are currently filming as a documentary, and new home is not just about a lifestyle change; rather, the bus operates as a potential prototyping lab for many potentially sustainable ideas using open source software/hardware from Arduino to Makerbots.

We recently sat down with Felicia and Ray to talk to them about what brought them to make this decision, how this will impact their son, the new technologies they are exploring, and the importance of establishing a network of collaborators.

Can you explain the story of wanting to change your life?

FB: I see this as an organic evolution that has been happening in my life for a while, this is no real change, just a more focused development of ideas.

RR: We have kind of always known that we wanted to travel around for ever and ever.  We met on tour, or we met at one of those underground DIY shows in NY, but I like to think we met on tour. I was on tour with this crazy cardboard-dance/sculpture-core performance art group called Eagle Ager and we were in this extremely janky frankenstein bus conversion, and Felicia was on one of her summer tours with her dance group, Modern Garage Movement.  We were both playing in Detroit one night at the National Bohemian Home, which was a performance space set up in this beautiful old abandoned theater, its closed now. That’s more of the story of how we met, but the important part is we were both on tour, and we loved being on tour and performing.

Then later, after we were dating, I went on tour as a live video designer with about 20 musicians, the Dan Deacon Ensemble, Future Islands, and Teeth Mountain. We were all in a full sized school bus converted to a tour bus powered by waste vegetable oil, I was responsible along with my friend Geoff Nosach from Eagle Ager for the conversion of the bus, myself mostly for the home and comfort conversions on the inside and all the legal stuff that goes with owning a bus.

After the tour, I was the caretaker of the bus for a while. By then Felicia and I were living in this shady but super sweet deal of an illegal yet rent-controlled sublet in the East Village.  The owner of the apartment was under constant battle with the management, and that summer he was evicted for ten days for some illegitimate reason. Luckily, I had the bus parked right around the corner on Houston street, so we just grabbed the things we really needed, moved into the bus which had a big comfy bed and a fully functional kitchen, and we just parked it by McCarren Park in Brooklyn and pretended like we were camping in the big city. It was our savior.  What could have been a truly horrible and stressful time turned into our own exciting and adventurous vacation.

FB: Of course, there are practicalities that are definitely changes from the day to day of living in new york city in an apartment, but we’re getting to manifest philosophies that I’ve been interested in living out in bigger ways for a long time.  The combination of my experiences of living on Min Tanaka’s Body Weather Farm in Hokkaido, Japan, and the simplicity of touring for years in a diy dance troupe pretty much fuses in this endeavor that Ray, Bowie [Felicia and Ray's son] and I are taking on.

So, there are two changes happening here — lifestyle as well as technological. How have you revamped the bus? Is it multipurpose?

RR: Besides being a fully functional home suitable for a newborn baby, the bus will also function as a mobile outdoor movie theater and performance venue. Removable bus seats transform into rows of outdoor seating, we’ll have a large projection screen made out of recycled plastic, a projector and sound system, all powered by biofuel and solar power.

Can you discuss the technologies you have you utilized to build it? Have you found any cost effective solutions for making it more sustainable than what’s currently available?

RR: As you know we use recycled fryer grease to fuel the diesel engine in our bus, I’ve been part of several Waste Vegetable Oil conversions the past few years with friends on other tours… its honestly not a big deal, any diesel engine will run vegetable oil. Diesel engines are able to combust “normally” non-combustible material via extreme compression. This combustion-by-compression method is very ancient and is the same principle used in the firepiston, which is still used today by some cultures and can be made from a variety of materials including bamboo and bone.

We are also building our own solar panels from individual solar cells purchased relatively cheaply on Ebay. We chose the newer technology, CIS (Copper Indium di Selenide) thin film solar cells over silicon because they gain efficiency with use whereas silicon loses efficiency over time. The thin film cells are also able to produce power in overcast weather or in partial shade. This type of solar technology gets used in space applications because the cells are extremely resistant to radiation. We really like the idea of merging ancient and space aged innovations.

As far as cost effectiveness, as much as we can do ourselves and manufacture ourselves is where we save big, gathering and filtering our own vegetable oil instead of purchasing toxic diesel fuel saves us literally hundreds of dollars every time we fill up the tank. Building our own solar panels from individual cells instead of purchasing a ready made panel will save a couple hundred per panel, not to mention all the manual labor we put in doing this all ourselves. We are also currently working with a friend who is a sculptor and ceramicist and we will soon be firing our own terra-cotta carbon filters for water filtration, we got the idea from a story we saw featured on NPR earlier this year.

Also, and we are very excited about this, we have just implemented another space age bit of technology to insulate our bus from external temperatures and sound. We’ve mixed a special ceramic additive into the paint for our bus which reflects heat and sound; it looks like a powder but its actually extremely tiny ceramic “balloons” that each contain a little bit of vacuum, which is a perfect insulator. We bought it from a company called Hy-Tech and they are a NASA technology partner. It also ends up being way cheaper than fiberglass or foam insulation, especially if you were going to paint anyways.

Any particular technology you would like to exploit that you haven’t managed to get your hands on?

RR: We want a Makerbot. The Makerbot is an evolution of the RepRap which is an open source and reproducing rapid prototyping machine. Everyone has a printer in their home or office nowadays… you essentially have your own personal printing press. A few hundred years ago that would have been so impossible to imagine. If we had a 3D printing machine like the Makerbot, we would use it for so many highly specialized applications for our bus/home conversion. Things like perfectly sized and shaped mounting brackets for our home made solar panels, custom camera mounts attached at points on the bus that would normally be troublesome places to attach a camera, pre-filters for removing larger bits of debris from waste vegetable oil gathering, or when we start collecting rainwater on our roof to make custom pre filters before the water goes into our own ceramic filters. We would also be able to make custom baby toys that suit our own artistic standards for Bowie’s development.  I’ve already designed a 3D printable baby rattle based on sacred geometry. The beads print out completely inside of the rattle that was featured on the thingiverse.com website, a virtual hub for open source 3D designs.

Additionally, we would also love to provide cutting edge technology companies the opportunity to test drive their technologies in applications they might not yet have considered — like Xogen Technologies in Canada. They have this absolutely earth saving technology that can purify waste water while producing hydrogen oxygen gas as a byproduct. They target large scale applications like for treating the wastewater for entire cities or for farms, but we would love to help them demonstrate how their technology can be scaled down to a family size, and have our own self contained, futuristic wastewater recovery unit on our mobile home that produces gas for our stovetop as an on-demand byproduct.

Of course along our journey and documentary, we’ll be searching for whatever other new innovations are out there and help to bring them to the light.

It seems like you put a great deal of forethought into this change, yet you have just become parents. How do you negotiate having to raise a child while rejecting a traditional American lifestyle? What are the benefits/perils you for see?

FB: I haven’t lived a traditional American lifestyle since I left the home in which I was raised in the suburbs of St. Louis.  I’m not even sure what a traditional american lifestyle is… as for the benefits of raising Bowie this way, well it is endless….He is going to learn to be self sufficient, to be inventive, to live harmoniously with nature.  Bowie is going to meet many different people and their ways and be impressed by the things that are helpful to him.

As for perils, I am very adamant about creating a sense of home for him and a place where he feels rooted, even as it is mobile. I don’t want him to only form fleeting relationships as we are traveling, we will be mindful of that.

In your trailer for your project, you cite willing to barter for your needs. How do you envision that working? Have you had to do it yet?

FB: If you make a connection with somebody, usually you end up realizing how you can help each other out.  That’s the sort of bartering I am excited about. Already we have made a trade with a super sweet man. He has given us a large space in his storage facility for the next year and in return we are featuring his company in our documentary.  Another woman, who owns a baby goods boutique in park slope, gave me some much needed stuff for giving her two daughters a tour of our bus. She wanted me to have those things and also wanted her kids to see what we’re up to.

RR: There have been a few businesses that by good fortune have crossed our paths and donated to us tangible and intangible goods in exchange for merely being connected to our project. Like the Brooklyn Roasting Company, a small start up that offers amazing and “real deal” Ethiopian coffee beans, independently certified Fair Trade and Organic, and roasted locally in Brooklyn, NY… it’s honestly the best f*&^ing coffee we’ve ever had. The owner Jim heard what we were doing and immediately offered us loads of free coffee and said he could ship more to wherever we are on the road.

There is this other company that Felicia is talking about was a total godsend in a real time of need for us. We had just given up our apartment and needed to have everything completely moved out and we had no place to put it all, and then while we were donating some of our bus seats to an organization called Build It Green that saves useful building materials from going to landfill, an older and very friendly Hassidic man came up to our bus and was marveling over it and asking us all these questions. It turns out he owned a (really awesome) storage facility in Brooklyn, and he said if we ever needed anything to give him a call.  Long story short, we were donated to us free storage for a year from this lovely storage facility, Lockaway Self Storage.

Do you think you will form more intimate relationships with people by doing it? If so, in what way?

FB: Completely. By spending time talking with the people we come across, instead of merely making a quick monetary transaction, we have already forged lovely relationships. In the two examples I just gave, we have made friends with these folks. We email back and forth.  I know some things about their lives already, and I expect that the ways that we know each other are only going to grow.

If you become successful with this, do you think you would like to make this a sustainable lifestyle choice with a larger community?

RR: We are already part of a larger community… just look at where we just performed [Whartscape] in Baltimore. There is this huge community of artists with no money that throw the hugest multi-day festival every year, this year was the fifth year and the last as its previous incarnation.

Plus, there’s our friends at greenbustour.com. We have been working with them behind the scenes and under the radar kind of since we got started with our own bus and around the time they got started on theirs. We will be collaborating heavily on many happenings to come, making new and exciting things possible, opening peoples eyes. There is this whole neo-conscious community right under the surface of “normal” life all over the world, and a big part of our film this summer is revealing this community and helping it to solidify and bubble to the surface of a more non-localized awareness.

Is this a long-term change?

FB: Like I said before, in the bigger picture, this isn’t really a change.  If we are talking specifics, like living on a bus for a long while, well, that is impossible to answer. I think as long as we are living true to our ideals, the details don’t matter. I am open to falling in love with some new place, parking the bus, and living there for an indefinite period,  or maybe we will be so fulfilled in our school bus that we will live on board into our gray haired years. Who knows?

Felicia Ballos and Ray Roy