Bio gas

[Woodstock]

Hi all,
i've been looking into this with some interest but having lurked around a few self sufficiency forums can't find any mention of it. Is it too much bother, not practical or not as efficient as other methods ?
Any thoughts would be welcomed.

[Elizabeth]

John Seymour's book has info on it.

[The Riff-Raff Element]

Not so far away from us there is a town that is using duck poop to make enough biogas to power 300 homes. I wrote a short piece about it a few months ago.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/jon__doust ... le_energy
So it is eminently possible, if you have enough of the brown stuff about the place. But, messing about with gas, you really have to know what you are doing. Good luck with your researches

[Odsox]

I investigated methane production when I was employed in the Brittany pig industry and although it's very easy to do, you certainly need vast quantities of poo. The anaerobic digester is reasonably easy to design but you really need to compress the resultant gas which then starts to get a wee bit more complicated.
Another interesting project I was involved in a few years ago was the production of wood gas. We converted a TVO tractor to run on wood gas and amazed people with a grey Fergie tractor that ran on logs !
That might be a interesting proposition for anyone with large quantities of burnable material at their disposal, as with this system the gas generator can be directly connected to a slightly modified diesel or petrol engine and generate electricity, but the big problem again is safety ... wood gas is predominantly carbon monoxide and is deadly.

[John Headstrong]

good place for info on that is

http://www.appropedia.org/Category:Biogas


and the simplest is http://www.appropedia.org/Home_biogas_s ... Digesters)