What If Your Residential Heating System Ran On Compost?

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What if you could heat your house all winter for free, heat your household water for free, and cook with free gas most of the year?  Sound to good to be true?  Well, it’s not!  And you can get almost everything you need to complete this project for free or next to nothing.  Build your own residential heat5ing system in just a few days.

The Jean Pain Method

If you have not heard of Jean Pain Method, you are about to get your mind expanded.  Jean Pain developed a way of using wood chips to supply all of the power for his household’s heating (water and air) and their cooking gas.  When he couldn’t find a wood chipper that met the needs of his system, he developed those as well.

Have you ever seen a large pile of wood chips steaming in the winter?  How about the steamy water vapor that comes off a compost pile when the weather turns cold.  If not, you may be surprised to know that a compost pile can easily develop an internal temperature of 160+ degrees Fahrenheit (over 62 degrees Celsius).  You may also not know that compost also gives off methane gas as it decomposes.

Jean Pain surmised that these two natural actions could be taken advantage of by the average land owner.  Over the span of a few years of experimentation, he developed a method that can be scaled up or down to suit a person’s heating needs.  He put the details of this system in a book entitled “Another Kind of Garden.”

Briefly, piling wood chips into a large enough pile can produce a steady supply of heat for almost a year.  That’s right, a year!  There are several ways to accomplish this, and if you have a little bit of land, this method of heating will certainly be of value to you.

Almost Free Heat

If you are willing to put in a few days work, you can build your own chip pile and capture the heat and escaping methane and use it to your advantage.  For complete details, download and read the pdf in the link in the previous section.