• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Eco-Friendly or "Green" Living Tips

People have done it on small scales as a way to preheat water going to their water heater, but you need to make the compost go anaerobic which is stinky and produces lower quality compost. But again, when it's anaerobic you can collect the methane that's generated too.

Waste heat recovery is being used in places with a lot of data centres though, which is pretty cool.
 
^ I get loads of heat from aerobic composting.

I also do anaerobic composting as well (Bokashi) and it doesn't seem to give off as much heat.

What gives? Is this anaerobic process somehow different? Is it more efficient? Or perhaps just more practical since you don't have to aerate it?

Seems like I wasn't the first to come up with the idea then. It would be cool to use it to heat my cold water tank since I have no way of heating it, unless I bought a load of expensive heat oil for my archaic boiler system.
 
I don't think it would be worthwhile. Compost should be aerated for optimum heating, which involves considerable work; of course, it must also be continually replenished and cleaned out to keep the temperature high, and both actions will reduce heat. Finally, you'd probably want a much higher temperature contrast than compost can provide for efficient heating, especially of a room.
 
^ are you aware of just how much heat a compost pile heats up?

If I used a large tank to act as a sort of storage heater, in the same way some solar water heaters do so that if it's a cloudy day, it won't matter if there are interruptions in the heat output. I run 'no-dig' gardens, so I need as much compost as possible (I can never get enough).

I think there are ways to get plenty of compostable material, even for free. For starters, farmers around my rural area would be more than happy for me to come and take their shit away for them. Grass cuttings are easy enough to get in summer too. And it looks like it's already been done by some people.

I think I might try it if I do some more research and it turns out to be viable.
 
^ That's a cool setup they've got going there. Thank you for posting that mate :)

I think this is going to be a cool project to undertake. I'm slowly but surely making my life more and more self sufficient. Eventually, one day in the future I hope to be almost completely self-sufficient, although I realise this won't happen overnight, will be hard and possibly expensive. It's a dream of mine and heating my water using this method does make sense, since I can use the end product that I'll need anyway, compost. I really need large amounts of compost anyway and it seems like a sensible idea to use the massive amounts of heat given off instead of it just going to waste!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top