The Genius of Jean Pain

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The compost-pile heating method is ideally suited to meet this need, since a biogas digester can easily be enclosed in a heatproducing heap. Jean Pain has ex perimented with a digester employing a tightly sealed four-cubic-meter vat wrapped with 1" polyethylene pipe. Water is circulated through the pipe to cool the vat when the warmth developed by the compost becomes excessive. Thus, heated water is also a by-product of the process.

In addition, a thermometer is placed in the top of the vat for monitoring the interior temperature, and a length of copper tubing runs from the vat to a series of rubber inner tubes which serve as gas storage space. [EDITOR'S NOTE: In working with methane, it's imperative that proper precautions against leakage be taken . . . since the confined fuel can be very explosive when mixed with a small amount of air.]

After 71 days of digestion, Jean's biogas plant produced nearly 3,750 cubic feet of gas with a heating value of almost 450 BTU per cubic foot. The 50 cubic feet of fuel available each day was used to feed appliances in the house, and to power the Pains' little Citroen 2CV truck.

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES FOR BRUSH COMPOST HEAT

Jean and Ida Pain hope that future work with brush composting will result in localized technologies that will return more land to small farming . . . and enable more people to make a living from the soil. In an era in which the survival of the small farmer is threatened by the continual escalation of petroleum-basedfuel costs, alternative energy schemes like M. Pain's do, indeed, offer a potential salvation for independent agriculturists . . . who have been the basis of our species' existence here on earth since our beginnings.

MOTHER'S EXPERIMENTS WITH COMPOST HEAT

When MOTHER's research staffers heard about the Jean Pain compost waterheating technique, they immediately decided to build an experimental bioheater out on the Eco-Village property. However-since our shredder isn't set up to produce the thin wood slivers described by Jean-we had to change the heap design slightly to suit our own situation.

MOTHER's resource manager, Larry Hollar, built the pile by erecting a sixfoothigh, five-foot-diameter tower from chicken wire and bamboo, and alternating four-inch layers of wood chips with oneinch layers of manure (to "trigger" the decomposition). Each stage of stacking was followed by thorough saturation with water . . . to achieve a humidification of 40-50%.

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