I threw out a tomato yesterday, and I felt horrible about it!
Not that I had much choice, the poor tomato had gone past the point of no return, and the house I am living in doesn’t make compost. While most people associate composting with gardening, it can also create heating gas for your home.
The plants that grow around your house can give you a cheap way to cook, and there is an amazing device that allows you use most kinds of biomass to refine methane. The kind of device you construct is up to you, but if you love composting, this is a great way to make sure that biomass is never wasted!
Gas For Life
When biomass rots it makes a number of chemicals. While you could just start a compost bin, if you decide to construct a biomass digester, you will still get a steady supply of nutrient rich slurry for the garden, but you will also make enough methane to cook everyday.
There is no fixed size or form for a biomass digester, and there are many different ways to build one. The basic idea is that you will “feed” the colony of bacteria that lives in the digester, and the waste products from the bacteria will yield useful substances.
How It Works
The system that makes this device work is simple as can be. All you have to do is feed your new biomass digester with some form of unwanted biomass on a daily basis, and after the bacteria finds homeostasis, it will start belching out methane.
You then collect the gas, put it in a storage container, and use it for any cooking or heating that you may need. These systems aren’t expensive to construct, and you will easily pay for the materials in the first year of use.
There aren’t many parts, so there isn’t anything that can really go wrong. This is also a perfect way for people in suburban environments to compost, because a biomass digester is a self-contained ecosystem. This means you won’t have to worry about lots of mess or smells, or any other unsightly parts that turn some people off to composting.
This kind of technology is a perfect example of how we can take things that would have been wasted, and use them to replace the need for fossil fuels. There is no grandiose planning needed, just a little bit of work, and the foresight to see how we can take advantage of what we are wasting everyday!
pictures (c) instructables user antoniraj
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