24 October 2010

Home Made Biogas - The Next Big Thing in Energy Cost Saving


With so many people who are keen to save money and are handy at DIY, home made biogas is the next most obvious way after insulation and solar panels:

Feature image for - Home Made Biogas article.

  • Save money on cooking fuel
  • Follow a green and sustainable lifestyle
  • Do it all without sacrificing the convenience and comfort of modern living.

Making biogas at home entails the use of a long forgotten technology (in the west at least) known as anaerobic digestion or AD. The secret of digesting organic waste materials in the absence of oxygen and simply piping the methane biogas produced to a cooking stove, has long been in use in India and China. Such plants have been run using community solid and liquid waste feed materials, and have been around for more than 200 years.

However, the DIY method catching on right now, is now much more advanced than those plants.

Furthermore, its use by those that are developing these the most successful home biogas plants has allowed it to be refined into a highly efficient and modern two stage thermophilic biogas production technique, similar to those used in large scale commercial biogas digestion plants. This DIY system utilizes wastes such as food waste and other high calorific biomass wastes available to householders.
These new home biogas systems are much quicker to produce biogas and more efficient in the quantity they produce per kilogram of organic feedstock produced, when compared with the traditional systems of the east.

They are also cheap to build using mass-produced "off the shelf" plastic tanks. A two stage digester capable of being maintained at the required very warm (thermophilic) temperatures should cost no more than $200 for materials.

What is more, the remaining liquid and fibrous materials which are the material left over after digestion are wonderful as fertilizer and soil improvement media for gardeners and fruit and vegetable growers.

Once you have successfully trialed DIY home made biogas for cooking, there is also a natural progression available for you in the future to go further and introduce electricity production from this biogas source. Quite naturally the industry (given a chance to get on with management and administration duties) will develop more sophisticated and efficient uses for the renewable (some would say "alternative") energy produced by AD.

Those who start now and gain the necessary AD Plant operational skills, by building and operating home made biogas plants, will soon find themselves very much in demand to design and build more plants for their friends and acquaintances.

We would also point out that as governments move forward over the next twenty or so years biogas and anaerobic digestion will become commonplace at all levels, and a huge amount of organic waste (now completely unused) will be utilized every day, for home made biogas production.

Are you thinking more about building a digester to produce home biogas methane? Steve Last is web master for the fact filled Anaerobic Digestion Community web site where much more home made biogas production information is available.

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