Heat Your Home with ..... Grass Clippings?

[quicksandfarmer]

Maybe true but I’d guess the composter is a lot more efficient. IMO for this to be practical you’d need an easy way to dry grass clippings and then just bag your yard when you mowed. I’m not sure that it still wouldn’t be easier to cut firewood. I think one guy could cut and split 10 tons of firewood in a day. Bagging 10 tons of grass, drying, and storing it it wouldn’t be as quick.

Imagine composting a bale of hay and then burning what is left over. Now imagine burning a bale of hay and composting what is left over. Which one, burning or composting, gets more out of that bale? That's the one that is more efficient.

Ten tons of hay is 400 50-lb bales. It all depends on what equipment is available as to how much work it is to gather that. Could be a fair bit.

 

[4570Man]

Imagine composting a bale of hay and then burning what is left over. Now imagine burning a bale of hay and composting what is left over. Which one, burning or composting, gets more out of that bale? That's the one that is more efficient.

Ten tons of hay is 400 50-lb bales. It all depends on what equipment is available as to how much work it is to gather that. Could be a fair bit.

Having a bailer, rake, mowers, wagons, tractors and whatever else is used for haying is a far cry from free so I was assuming it would be picked up using only the lawnmower and bagger. The 400 hay bails is worth $2000 so again not very practical. The 10 tons of firewood is worth 1/3 that much. Burning firewood in a regular wood stove is 40-50 percent efficient. It’s about 75 in the more expensive high efficiency units. I have no idea how efficient the composting unit is.

 

[oosik]

4570Man - I think you are looking at a hard days work to cut and split ten tons of firewood - definitely not an easy pleasant day. So, depending upon species, a SEASONED chord will weigh 2000 to 3000 pounds. A green chord, again depending upon species, will weigh 50% more.

The only wood I have here is pine. I'd be willing to wager that on a hard day I could cut and split two full chords of green pine. All things being equal that most likely would represent around 6000 to 6500 pound of green pine.

You MUST be a real horse or your firewood is laced with lead.

If I really busted my hump - I might get two and a half chords cut and split. But I also remember, I was in no condition to repeat on the following day. The following day meant stacking in the wood wagon - bringing it in off the property and restocking in the wood shed.

You know, "working the wood" brings back fond memories because you tend to forget all the sore muscles, bumps & bruises - blisters and cuts.

 

[TheMan419]

Hmmmm I wonder if horse manure would work for this. I got a ton of that. And by ton I mean way more than an actual ton.

 

[shooterdon]

Whenever I see the word "Green", my red flag goes up.

Does anyone really believe this process produces no, or little, waste? I smiled at the part about venting a dryer exhaust into it to heat the new material being added so the good bugs would not die. I wonder where the dryer air blown into the drum goes?

How do you dry the volume of grass clippings and leaves needed to heat a home for a season? And then what....bale them up? Where do you store the feed materials?

His concept of providing employment to seasonal workers is interesting. The seasonal workers I know would rather collect unemployment than work during the winter.

But I only scanned the article and may have missed some of the answers.

 

[Diggin It]

Again, all we have to do is stick our hand into a compost pile to know the concept would work -- but on what scale? Look at the GeoThermal thread. Those guys are running hundreds of feet of tubing. Seems to me like you'd have to have a small silo full of material composting to get enough heat for a house.

 

[newbury]

Again, all we have to do is stick our hand into a compost pile to know the concept would work -- but on what scale? Look at the GeoThermal thread. Those guys are running hundreds of feet of tubing. Seems to me like you'd have to have a small silo full of material composting to get enough heat for a house.

Have you ever been around a "small silo"?
When I was hired out to work with a farmer (about 1965?) he had a small silo. It was hot enough at the bottom to provide some additional heat to the barn during the Vermont winter.

 

[Paddy]

Diggin it,

The indoor unit in your first post is a dream at best. The concept in general is very real. Examples where it works involve several tri-axle loads of sawdust, wood chips and "free" organic matter. It's heaped up in layers with black poly pipe with filled with water mixture for heat transfer. Injection of water from the top and air from below via 4 in corrugated drain pipe. A bit of Nitrogen get's it started. They can produce heat for several months. In the end, you have a bunch of compost. The heat generated via decay is the same as the heat if burned.

Compost Power! | Cornell Small Farms Program

 

[Budweiser John]

Interesting concept but i’me not giving up my geothermal system.

B. John

 

[hslogger]

I have an arborist friend who has a commercial tree service. He is also a college grad, soil scientist. For decades he has had a system of large diameter heavy PVC pipe buried under this giant wood chip pile he adds to most days with fresh chips. This pile is managed and pushed up with skid steer and is a mountain. He runs all of his shop water system through this set up to wash all of his equipment and it runs HOT water for a long time winter or summer in Western Oregon. I see no reason at all why you couldn't use this resource to heat a building with a circulation pump and some radiant set up in a slab or otherwise.