The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Equipment => Topic started by: anderso on October 24, 2012, 09:27:57 pm
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have been looking at a range of options to produce fuel/power..
in places like India and china they have started to develop anaerobic digesters for the house. in look deeper they have some folks in the US and Canada using these. simple to building and operate and what shocked me was that DFRA has details on the UK law for using them is ....
basically you have 2 containers 1 in the other full the bottom one with items that contain sugars such as fruit, grain crops etc and will produce me thane to power cookers and generators
you can also build bigger ones to run off animal/human waste but you need a bigger storage tank, also the power output is less
1kg fruit, grains skins of pots and other fruits will give approx 250g methane
40kg animal/human waste will give approx 250g methane
any one seen heard or tried one
I am going to make a small one to sort out the best type and to see if you can mix and match photos will come...
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When I was at uni (in the 80s) we had one of them on the farm; can't remember all the details, but as far as I remember, they did mix. They had it hooked to a little gas stove - perfect turnaround: cook your food, chuck the waste into the underground chamber, relieve yourselves and chuck that into it, too - then you have enough gas to cook your next dinner! ;D
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Anderso, did you ever make one?
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20 yrs or so ago the factory maint guys at Peterboroughs British sygar corp made an amazing digester using 300 litre blue food grade barrels , two barrels , each had a pigtail stirrer sealed inside , they ran on 12 volts .
All charging material was liquidised , produced gas was self propelled into one of two barrels that each had two antiflashback flame arrestors on the gas outlets pipes.
The digester barrels were inverted and clamped into a bigger barrel ( like a gasometer . each gas barrel had weight of water filled containers put on the top to give a working pressure for a small burner set up which they used to heat a 10 x 12 glasshouse .
Last time I spole to Alvin the system had been upgraded with a drain cock sustem so that the gas was used to propel the fully digested matter out the pipe . The gas outlets to the gas ometer had one way valves fitted to allow all generated gas to help make up the supply.
He said that they were working on the Mk 2 system that would have a simple sealed plunger charging tube to each digester barrel and that they would be using some old fuel oil tanks of 2000 litres each for the actual digesters.
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am working on mark two mk one was only 20l size but it produced gas from chopped up goat/chicken and household waste.
mark two is the blue 300l size, if the info I have from India is right I should be able to produce enough to run a two ring cooker (camping type and heat the greenhouse, if that works then I will move on to the off grid production eventually getting enough to power a generator and cooking for the home. remember the dream off grid for when the revolution comes.
will keep you informed