http://www.edibleacres.org
https://www.youtube.com/channel/edibleacres/join – Join as an Edible Acres member for access to members live Question and Answer sessions and to support our work!
https://www.paypal.me/edibleacres – A simple and direct way to ‘tip’ to help support the time and energy we put into making our videos. Thanks so much!
Edible Acres is a full service permaculture nursery located in the Finger Lakes area of NY state. We grow all layers of perennial food forest systems and provide super hardy, edible, useful, medicinal, easy to propagate, perennial plants for sale locally or for shipping around the country…
http://www.edibleacres.org/purchase – Your order supports the research and learning we share here on youtube.
We also offer consultation and support in our region or remotely. http://www.edibleacres.org/services
Happy growing!
We run a small-scale permaculture nursery out of our backyard. And so here we are in the fall where it gets below freezing most nights and then thaws out by day. Got a lot of plant material that is healed in to rich soil and sawdust to hold the roots in a good way. But periodically we need to interact with a bunch of water to wash roots. This time of year, ice cold rain water is a little bit of a tough cell. So we collect rain water. I’ve talked about this before. We’ll turn these offline relatively soon once we go soundly below freezing. But we use that rain water for all of our nursery work. And you can imagine on mornings where you need to go through and break up the ice in order to get started for the day. That can be both rough on hands and rough on plant roots. Be nice to have warm water, but I don’t want to be using electricity and fossil fuels. So here’s this very simple concept. It needs a lot more layers of optimization to be really legit and functional. And I’d love to get some feedback from people. But basically, it’s a simple metal compost ring that has a bunch of very, very active compost going with a scavenged tub we found um that has a float valve to that rainwater tank. And so the water can flow into here and sit in a fully enscconced warm bed. You can see here the temperature has dropped actually quite a bit. It was up around 111F or 45 centrade. It’s now hanging out a little shy of 90° F or 30 centrade. And that is down in the soil area or the com the active composting area. The water itself, I don’t have a temperature measurement for it, but it’s not too bad. It’s comfortable. I can have my hands in there for a while. It’s definitely not ice that needs to be broken up. I know there’s a lot of ways that this is not optimized. For example, this random plastic tub with a lid definitely doesn’t convey the heat as well as it could. A random lid without lots of insulation. So, I should have boards over this or some way to cap it. I hear all that in a lot of people’s minds as you look at this, but this is a place to begin. This is about a 20inut project. At the end of this video, I’ll share how this was assembled. I would love to get better feedback and I think we’ll do another one that’s larger, has a metal container with a lid that has a lot of insulation on top and maybe the whole thing has insulation as well. But for now, as we need to take apart these bare root plants and wash and inspect and hydrate their roots before they’re shipped to folks, we can still use rain water and compost tea. So these buckets all become compost tea because of all the compost on the root systems getting flushed off. So, it hydrates and nourishes the roots. And we can offer them probably about 60 to 70 degree Fahrenheit rain water by having the thermopilic action of compost around the container radiate in in a profoundly inefficient way as a rough sketch, but something that’s better than nothing and certainly not going to be icy until we finish shipping. A very, very loose implementation of what I think is a sound concept. I’d love your ideas around optimizing. Do the little minor upgrades that I suggest make sense to you? Do you think there’s some much better way to go about this? It would need to be free. It would need to be something that takes about a half hour in total and only uses materials that are waste already. Finally get a stick tossed for our friend here. Go get it. And we will get back to work assembling these packs of beautiful plants that need to find homes. Thank you all for your orders if you’ve put them in. This is everything getting prepared to zip out the door. If you’ve missed some of our sales, thank you for your patience. March 1st and September 1st are when we offer our biggest sales of the year. So, you feel free to mark that on your calendar or think about becoming a member if you want to know early. But for now, time to ship and have slightly warmer water. Thank you. One trillion trillion tiny living beings all pooping and peeing and having kids and eating stuff around a vat of water in an old dumpstered plastic thing. Thanks. We’ve got a pretty complex work area here. You can see our water tank in the background there. And when it’s warm enough, it works fine. We can just dip in with uh buckets and refill them and use them for a bit. This is the tank there with the float valve. But once it starts getting colder, that’s very susceptible to freezing for sure. So, I identified an area off to the side. It’s actually a little bit further out of our way, which is nice. We can tuck it under some trees. George is helping me uh assess the site and move some compost and scraps. This is a lot of the leftover material from preparing our plants for shipping. And then the muck that we add on is nutrient-rich, and that helps kickstart the composting process. working with 2×4 welded wire ring that’s four feet tall and cut at one foot in a few spots so it can be folded down. So this is a three foot tall ring that’s reinforced at the top. I really like this design. It’s self-standing and sturdy and it’s a little bit smoother on the top which is nice. So, we start by putting some compost in there, loading in some food scraps, some leftover leaves, and then all of this really nutrient-rich muck from washing the roots of plants. A lot of moisture, a lot of fertility. All of that helps facilitate decomposition and generate warmth. We’re also using waste hay, which is from the bedding of our chicken coupe. So, this is hay that’s been mixed with manure that goes a little bit out to the edges, which creates a nice sponge and insulation, and then we infill with shredded leaves and bits of plant material to get it all going. Here, there’s a wheelbarrow load of mixed manurses and leaf bags. So, we’ve got high nitrogen and high carbon to mix into this and get our ratios right. I’m test fitting a bread tray here as our platform for the water tank. That’ll be what this sits on when it’s full enough. And that’ll give a nice stable platform for the tank to be in. Juan here is removing the float valve, which is really straightforward. It’s just a hose clamp. And we can slip that off and then replplum this, so to speak. Simple for sure, but works fine. Now, all the parts are together, and we’re ready to get it going. The compost bin is almost full. Lots of leaves, lots of hay, lots of good carbon, and then the tank is sitting proud in there, but buried in a little bit. With the lid on, it allows for the rest of the compost to be banked up along the sides. Put the hose in first and start flowing it in since the float valve is very slow in refilling. And you can see here the lid is on. We banked everything around it and then put some soil on top. You could even use this for starting seeds in the spring with radiant heat underneath. And we have a little bit of leftover hay and bedding from the chicken coop. We can bank that against the outside for additional warmth and insulation. And this is it all together, ready to go. On day 1 through three, it did not heat much at all. But by day four and five, it started to accumulate heat and get quite a bit warmer than ambient air. Very simple system, very, very inefficient in a lot of ways. I recognize that, but it was a great prototype for uh the basics that we have here. Now the float valve is in place and some binder clips help stabilize it from moving and that will be good enough to keep it auto refilled and uh provide warm enough water for our purposes. This little compost temp probe is a really nice easy way to kind of get a sense of what the temperatures are. started out a little bit below 60° Fahrenheit and reached 110 or 45 degrees centigrade um pretty quickly couple days. More insulation, more optimization, all sorts of upgrades to be done, but this is good enough as a place to start. Thanks,
31 Comments
I like the idea of free hot water.❤❤❤
A nice thick piece of styrofoam would work well as a lid.
I love how you use compost to reap the benefits of the heat for plants and now water plus heating your chicken runs! Low tech at its finest
I think that it would be better with a bigger pile, I'm not sure that the material on the sides of the container will compost enough to generate much heat. I haven't tried this, but I do compost with a system that has rings about the same size, and it gets to 140 at times, even in the dead of winter.
Very warm water setting in such a plastic tub may leach chemicals you don't want in your garden. Just a thought.
The key for heat transfer is surface to volume ratio. That's why Jean Pain used hose wrapped around and around through a truly massive compost pile to provide heat for a home and outbuildings for as much as a year from one pile. He was also able to capture methane off of the same pile and provide fuel for cooking. His work was the pioneering demonstration of potential for this approach and it hasn't really been improved upon 😉
Nice. I might try fully burying the water tank (which would involve sealing it properly) and having a hose come out of the heap. That way you're insulating the tank better. You could also run the hose around the tank inside the heap a few times for extra capacity.
Below-ground tanks will get you to 60-65 degrees, well above freezing. But if you want to do something aboveground, why not place next to the chicken coop itself? My coldframe is surrounded by two chicken pens and a duck pen.
I’ve always wondered – what are the black trays called? (The containers currently heeling in trees.)
what a cool idea, great video!
Might want to try some scrap greenhouse cover over that pile too…
Man I wish we were closer in distance for some collaboration! We have done so much on this topic!
Don't worry about the plastic tub. It will conduct enough heat to be equal in temperature to the compost. Yes, it is slower than a metal tank would be, but it is 24/7 in that compost so slow doesn't matter, and any metal is going to conduct the cold from the top much better.
Do get some insulation for the top of the tub. You could use compost if you had an exit hose.
Adding cold water is going to drop the temperature of the compost, eventually enough to stop the process. Monitor it.
Insulation around the perimeter of the compost would help, but it is a tricky application. Rockwool maybe.
Good luck with all your future experiments!
Wow, makes me think what COULD be possible. I love this passive heat idea. Thanks for sharing.
If you just want some hot water in this fashion the setup is mostly perfect.
Here's a video about a similar project where they use the hot water for showering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPtITE4BzCM
.5 inch polyethylene pipe is very cheap and comes in a roll at home depot. You can layer it in the entire height of the pile and keep the natural shape to form a large slinky. I have seen it done with manure piles for a house and its domestic hot water.
How about a horse manure-powered hot bed, surrounded by bales of hay or straw, with a steel tank and thick styrofoam-insulated cover? Could that work?
It's a bit of a zero sum game if you're using that compost heat. You're stealing heat from the compost to heat the water, which means your compost will remain cooler. Depends how much you want to bring the compost down. Then again, you have many composting methods around the farm – a little sacrifice to make winter work doable is likely well worth the compost heat loss.
Research Jean Pain's lifes work. Hes already done (RIP) the work experimentation etc.
I was just at Lowes and 3ft wide house wrap is available for you 3 foot sides.
I love how you do and tewt things. And aren’t stumped by ’perfect’ .
I’ve been a long time follower and now am going back to university as a energy efficiency engineer.
You said yourself, plastic if not the best conductor, Keep you eyes out for large metal containers. But in compost it also needs to be resistant to plant an mushroom acids. If a bakery renews it mixing bowl you’ll get great capacity and quality of stainless… but other that that it’s rare.
So plastic it is, if you keep the water in contact longer, heat will make its way ! No problem !
If you want a dynamic sytem, not a large amount of water : then, a loop through compost is useful. It’s counter intuitive, but the cold water needs to move this way : it starts where the compost is cooler, and ends where the compost is warmer. That way the water equalizes to the hottest temp and not a middleground.
I would say the single easiest thing you can do is insulate the lid of your tote. Crumpled plastic bags and tape, or off cut of foam, or wood shavings in a pillow case… under( inside) your lid or over it when closed.
Any dark containers in the sun to store or temper the water before it goes in the system would be good. Slate and painted copper (or oxydized copper with the right acid to turn black) can make good low tech solar collectors. Pass water through it with a solar pump, store in an burried -in-compost and or insulated container.
A rocket stove for efficient wood heating comes to mind too if you need to finish heating it to a better temp, for washing hands for example.. again here a metal pot is needed. If you have the right soil, clay rich but sandy too, you can hand shape it very quickly. It will cook the clay on your first use. Some metal parts to hold embers are needed, scraps will do.
Ah and don’t forget liquid gold as the booster to heat up compost quickly.
Other than replacing the lid with maybe just a chunk of foam board, I think your design looks pretty good to me. Why complicate it?
Those upgrades make sense. Would be cool if you held the fencing up a foot or 2, to allow compost to fall out coninually so you can harvest the compost and add more /mix material.
Why not have one of your panels and a pump and recirculate it back and forth from the ibc in pipe to the holding tote and just insulate the ibc with sawdust or chips being the pipe and tote are insulated by the compost ring everything you already have or can get.
I’ve seen something similar to this from Ben Falk! I bet he has some good ideas you could use 😊
I’m waiting for the compost heated hot tub! ❤
Salvage > perfect. Buying/transporting new items cancels the fossil fuels saved!❤🎉
Put a bunch of empty plastic bottles on the water surface for insulation!❤
Looks great!!!!
Thank you.