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Our original plan was to build a little hoop house, put a pile of hot
compost next to it, and pump water though the hot pile to heat the
greenhouse.
We spread a layer of hot compost on the ground and then laid some
coils of 1/4" tubing on the compost. Then we covered the tubing with
about 2' more of hat compost. We hooked up a small pump to the
tubing and then pumped water through the tubing. Next, we measured
the temperature in the wash tub. The water temperature was about
60 degrees in the tub when we started and after about 1/2 hour, it was
still the same temperature. We found that if you left the water in the
pipe for another 1/2 hour, it warmed up quite a bit but we did not
measure the temperature.
What we learned: It's not as easy as we thought to heat water quickly
enough so that if you pump it through the pile, you get a lot of heat.
We had started with 100' of tubing but we got a lot of kinks and had to
make it smaller. about 30' long inside the pile. I'm guessing that if we
had a bigger pile and 200' to 300' of tubing. we could probably
generate a fair amount of heat.
We also learned that we could run a 350' extension cord out to the pile
a run a small pump.
Next Steps: Redesign the hoop house to put the manure inside and
see if we can heat it that way.
outside when we did this experiment. 3/10/05
very safe but we made it though alive. The experiment
looked more like a moonshine still than a compost water
heater -- good thing it was behind the barn out of sight!