Off-grid shower heated by compost | Hacker News Reader

Off-grid shower heated by compost

youtube.com

30 pointsTimedToasts13 comments

Apologies to those who have seen this factoid, but:

"The power output of the core of the Sun is about 276.5 watts per cubic metre...around the same as a compost pile."

https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.h...

This was such an interesting video, and was really well presented, too. Big kudos to the creator, I never thought I'd be this fascinated by a compost pile!

You’d want an archimedes screw with some water channels inside to keep this moving forever.

p.s. CDC recommend wearing gloves and mask when working with compost.

Thanks for submitting! There was a lot of heat coming off that pile. Next step is to heat a hot tub.

that would be seriously impressive!

(Video) would be helpful in the title. 70° off of compost is impressive.

Highly recommend the other videos my this channel. Very interesting and wildly detailed presentations of different small-scale framing experiments!

It's a great idea and I have about one cubic meter of permanently composting material every year, but I don't shower in the garden and can't think of economically feasable use cases for myself.

So I guess it's still just pumpkins in october and humus for the garden in spring.

This is great.

In the industrial era, the phrase 'waste heat' became widely used. In fact, in many cases it's actually 'wasted heat'. I'd bet we can remember old, and find many new, ways to conserve energy costs.

I wonder how difficult it would be to use this concept to heat a room.

This is indeed done for heating some greenhouses. You put the compost boxes next to the greenhouse and the greenhouse wall has a wire mesh and a sliding panel to control the heat exchange. Contact temperature can be 90+ degrees Fahrenheit / 32+ degrees Celsius. You can take it a step further and run large diameter pipes under ground 150+ feet or 45+ meters to bring the circulating ambient temperature to around 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius as an easier starting point to heat up, then recirculate some of the air with solar/battery powered fans.

Directly heating a home in this method would not be ideal due to the gasses emitted from the compost. You would need an inductive method such as water or coolant shedding some of the heat from the compost using coils in glass to protect the coils. Between geothermal piping and inductive heating, you could probably raise the home temperature enough to bring the cost of the supplementary heating down significantly, assuming a small home.

well they don't call it a steaming pile of shit for nothin!

With 9 cubic metres (3x3m pile) it can keep hot water flowing for hot showers for an entire winter season.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com