Biogas at Home

Reader Contribution by Warren Weisman
Published on October 22, 2014

As we head out the door on our road trip to the 2014 Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka, Kansas, I wanted to give an idea of how much energy can be generated at home using biogas while using the example of our home biogas digesters we will be exhibiting at the event. Home biogas and solar – both photovoltaic electric and solar thermal – would complement one another quite well. Biogas provides excellent, clean burning fuel for year-round cooking energy and a small amount of stand-by electric, while PV can do the heavy lifting for electric and solar thermal for heating and hot water.

Just as solar panels depend on the amount of available sunlight, the amount of biogas that can be produced depends on the amount of organic waste available. A typical American household with a lawn or garden will generate enough energy to cook three meals a day. Our two cubic meter (525 gallon) home digesters are intended to be fed between 10 and 30 pounds of mixed waste per day, such as table scraps and garden waste, animal manure, grass clippings and tree leaves. This works out to be between a third and a full 5-gallon bucket per day, depending what temperature they are operated at. The units are fully insulated and have a heat exchanger filled with pet-friendly glycol beneath the digestion chamber intended to connect to an evacuated tube solar heater. Naturally, a wintertime hoop house would help improve performance.    

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