Really enjoying seeing all the explorations into the compost heating systems. I'm hoping to use a similar method to heat my off-grid ceramics studio for the fall and winter months. Doubt I'll be able to get it going this season, but love seeing more and new ideas of how to do it!
Looks great. I'm interested to see if this affects the compost breakdown at all. Seems like it might be taking quite a bit of heat out of the compost. But I suppose as long as it heats the greenhouse, it doesn't really matter if it takes longer to break down. Great idea!
Just had a suggestion for creating more heat and keeping more heat in your compost pile. Cardboard! excellent and almost all the time free resource, I use cardboard to line my wooden compost boxes, that are about 5ft by 5ft the wooden boxes have no slated slides and this doesn't create much of issue in terms of air circulation, I've had great decomposition with tons of heat and fungal development later on. Good luck this season and hope everything goes smoothly for spring and beyond!
Really great reminder. I had some extra burlap and old bed sheets so thats what we used, but with some rope and a truck full of cardboard I bet someone could create some seriously insulative layers around a pile like this and preserve a TON of heat. Thanks!
Happy new year to you and your viewers. I have a much different situation- 4 chickens - in Australia- but your advice is wonderful. I have a big messy garden and I’m looking forward to utilising your advice.
Fun stuff! Thanks for the summary. We sold our house last year so I had to destroy the greenhouse and compost chamber. Sad day. Moved to a condo without a significant yard so I will have to wait until the next house to build another greenhouse
Oh, I'm so excited to see this! Thank you for sharing your experiment. In video #2, would you mind giving rough dimensions of your pile, greenhouse, and water tank? For some reason on video, everything looks either smaller or larger than it does in real life, lol.
Thanks, good note. You can check out the playlist of 'roundpole greenhouse' on our channel if you wanted to see a lot more detail on that... .Roughly 12' deep from house to southern side, 20' wide and 8' tall in that space. Tank is roughly 150-200 gallons, pile is 3.5' tall and 6' across... All rough guesses but gives you framework.
I'm so glad you mentioned Stanley's litter because I meant to ask you about that! I've got a lot of cats and kittens and want to switch from clumping clay litter and instead use something that I can just toss into my cold compost. Some of the stuff sold in stores use baking soda as an additive and I'm worried that cat urine and baking soda will be very alkaline over time.
I believe I would be more concerned about the bacterial composition first. You don't want any cross-contamination around your fruits and vegetables. Depending on the size of your compost heap, you may want to measure the amount of clay that you were adding to that Heap.
@@paulatwood998 I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn't mean that I'm already dumping clay clumping litter onto the compost. Oh, that would be a big mistake! I just want to switch to something that can be composted and THEN add that.
This is incredibly cool. Please post the temperatures when it's fully operational. Why did you not add more green material to the compost? The chicken manure has enough nitrogen to get it hot? Do you have problems from not turning the pile?
We didn't have any greens to work with at the time, and the coop had to be cleaned out so thats what it was built with. Should be able to provide the raw ingredients needed... We'll see and I'll share notes :)
Dig a hole the size of what you got for your compost and deep enough, then you make it air tight with a lid on. you plug a methane collector to it and you can use the gas to cook your stuff or whatever.
I'm planning on saving windows from a local school that will be demolished next summer, to build a greenhouse half dug into the ground for some passive warmth... I think I'll be adding a compartment for some composing. I'm not worried about smells since it'll be a separate building. But do you think it'll be a problem otherwise? (aside from taking space and inviting rodents)
Worth experimenting with. If you have compost inside think about using that space to put flats for seed starting, etc since there will be so much warmth!
Sean, I noticed that you put the pipe more around the edges of the pile than in the centre. Would the centre of the pile not be hotter? Great video as ever. Thanks for the great content. Cheers Alec
Great question(s)... I wasn't sure how much pipe I had and wanted gentle, easy arcs to lay in so I went this way. I suspect I will regret it and would have wanted even MUCH longer run of pex with a bit more oriented towards middle. We'll have to see...
@@edibleacres I'm just trying to figure out an even more efficient way - maybe another metal like that heavy duty steel pipe or a thick copper plate that everything sits atop. I love the concept of compost heating.
Would adding urine to the pile be an option for adding moisture?...I wonder if there would be too much nitrogenous material considering all of the chicken manure present?...Always love your thoughtful, rational and waste nothing solutions! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Always an option for sure, and I've used it extensively in other projects. In this case it isn't necessary, the pile had the ratios already strongly in the N realm...
Would using a free water tank from Craigslist or two help with your passive water heating. Paint the water tanks black, the sun will help heat the tanks when the sun 🌞 shines.
Very cool idea! Hey I’m curious on what all you use in your deep litter system for your chickens? I have a base layer of wood chips with dried leaves on top along with some dried grass, it works well but I have to add more every week at this point to keep the smell down. Looks like you are using mostly hay?
Mostly hay because we got a nice deal on it in the fall.... It's easy to lay down just a little over every days poops... It is a daily layering that seems functional for at least a few months at a time.
Ah, you should not use dc current from the solarpanel to make heat directly. Install a Air to Air heatpump in the house and use the solar to power other stuff (like the freezer) in the house. Always interesting to watch how you evolve your compost heating system!
Hi i watched dirtpach heaven and she does the samething using hotbed heat but in the green house isnt be better to do easier job in winther and chicken and rabits also can use it
As always you put my old grey cells to work. I wonder what would happen if you used an air compressor to blow more oxygen into the pile. Can you use it to build a compost pile way bigger, can you regulate the heat generation with the amount of air pumped in? What if if you preheated the cold outside air by a very long inlet buried way below the frost line in the soil in order to tap into the "constant" temperature way below? What about extracting the heated CO2 rich air from the compost pile and how to put it to use? For me it's just brain gymn, I neither have the materials nor the stamina to put it to the test ... sorry ... best wishes from Holland
Neat idea, but I think the additional air work can be skipped if the pile has a really nice layer of sticks/debris at the bottom. That will allow air to naturally pull in from the bottom and then work up. This pile could hhave used more passive air setup, but it is still working quite nicely.
So cool to see this happening! In fact, I'm wondering how cool it is to start with. Just for eventual comparisons, did your thermometer get accidentally buried in the woodchips somewhere? Just curious how hot it is before the eventual precipitation gets the biological stuff really dancing in that pile. It'll be really hot to see that happen. I'll be wondering "how hot" though. Jean Pain may have kept it about 110°f for 11 months around that methane producing area, but Gaelan Brown mentioned that maybe 135° could knock out some weed seeds. Is my ocd kicking in yet, I wonder?
I didn't temp probe it because I'm quite sure as it was getting piled it would just be ever so slightly warm... maybe 60-70F. The update will show the real temp now, but looks about 135-160 at the top... Incredible how fast that happens, and certainly room for WAY more heat extraction... I'd love to see excellent heat transfer and a pile holding around 100F... Feels intuitively like a sweet spot... We'll share mote notes.
Is there a specific reason why people don't put the compost pile IN the greenhouse, apart from not designing the greenhouse to allow for the space required?
People do that, though it adds a much bigger human labor element because you have to pay more attention to things like moisture and be more vigilant about ensuring the pile doesn't invite anything unwanted to live in such close proximity to your plants.
Great idea if the greenhouse is not attached to home. We hope to heat our home with excess heat from the greenhouse and I don't want those odors/gasses in our home...
Sean, I am planning to put a hot compost pile inside my greenhouse for next winter. Is there any reason this wouldn’t work or be advisable? Cheers Alec
Some worry about hydrogen sulfide and other offgases but I think the worry is overstated, especially if you build your pile properly and turn it. H2S is from anaerobic decomposition much more than a properly aerated compost pile.
I think that you will get less heatlosses if you form walls around the pile. A sphere have the least surface area compared to volume, but a cylinder is more practical to build, and to transfer o2 into. I think a cylindrical Johnson su style bioreactor with reinforcement mesh/ tarp as wall would be better, but skip the airholes (its winter, less activity).
Would you consider adding urine to your pile for heat? I have seen this with a few other compost projects and it seemed to be helpful. Yt:David the good and dirt patch heaven.
I have used 5 to 10 gallons on a compost pile for heating a outdoor shower. It heated up to 160 pretty fast. the water came out at 130. This was a home school science fair experiment my son and I put together.
Pex is a poor conductor of thermal energy. You might consider getting black pipe, or copper if you have the scratch. You can make a very inexpensive heat exchanger with black pipe. I would still use pex as the transfer piping but you'll get a much better heat transfer with less distance/surface area with a metal surface.
He answered this question in a video FAQ he did a while back. The answer is: yes rats are around, no they don't pose a problem and he considers them a part of the cycle. Chickens will snatch small rodents if they find them, and rats don't actually cause any problems for compost piles. They aerate the pile and add organic material. As long as they aren't coming into your house it's not a huge deal. For those of us living in busier suburbs, preventing rats can be more important. But this pile he shows here doesn't have much in it that rats would be attracted to (aside from a warm home). Kitchen scraps will do that a little more.
I love that your greenhouse doubles as a catio for Stanley 😄
I work at a hot spring hotel in Montana, We have root zone heating using gravity fed piped hot spring water. It works awesome in this cold climate!
Sounds awesome! Hot springs are amazing.
That sounds pretty dreamy, wow!
This is great! We’re doing this also, but we’re colder and everything outside is frozen solid. Good luck this winter season
Your system seems really cool! Especially like how you put the pump on a timer to save battery and let the water heat up
@@bidybo thank you! We’ve got some similar experiments running in our 52’ greenhouse at the moment trying to keep everything alive lol
Loving Stanley’s scratching post.
The real star of this show is Stanley... You gotta get him on here more!
Really love whenever you show the compost heating stuff :D
Stanley is one lucky cat to have his own compost-heated cat bed!
I look forward to seeing how this works!
Me too!
Love the Edible Acres "Way"! May good things come.
Happy and a prosperous new year to you both.
Thank you, you too.
Always a treat seeing Stanley.
Always love the compost videos Shawn! Looking forward to the second part!
Me too :)
Happy New Year 🎆 to you as well. Always interesting to watch your experiments. Stanley is a cute supervisor 👍
Love the use of char to filter air ...
Really enjoying seeing all the explorations into the compost heating systems. I'm hoping to use a similar method to heat my off-grid ceramics studio for the fall and winter months. Doubt I'll be able to get it going this season, but love seeing more and new ideas of how to do it!
Just lots of rough idea experiments from this side of things :)
Looking forward to see how this results
Looks great. I'm interested to see if this affects the compost breakdown at all. Seems like it might be taking quite a bit of heat out of the compost. But I suppose as long as it heats the greenhouse, it doesn't really matter if it takes longer to break down. Great idea!
I don't think the pex circuit really scrubs much heat out. We'll have to see, I'll make an update soon.
Just had a suggestion for creating more heat and keeping more heat in your compost pile. Cardboard! excellent and almost all the time free resource, I use cardboard to line my wooden compost boxes, that are about 5ft by 5ft the wooden boxes have no slated slides and this doesn't create much of issue in terms of air circulation, I've had great decomposition with tons of heat and fungal development later on. Good luck this season and hope everything goes smoothly for spring and beyond!
Really great reminder. I had some extra burlap and old bed sheets so thats what we used, but with some rope and a truck full of cardboard I bet someone could create some seriously insulative layers around a pile like this and preserve a TON of heat. Thanks!
Wonderful ideas! Thanks for sharing and making good use of "waste products"
It will be neat to see how a cleanout of a coop that needed to happen anyway can provide heat for another space.
Stay warm! Looks cold!
Happy new year to you and your viewers. I have a much different situation- 4 chickens - in Australia- but your advice is wonderful. I have a big messy garden and I’m looking forward to utilising your advice.
Nice to have you with us!
Fun stuff! Thanks for the summary. We sold our house last year so I had to destroy the greenhouse and compost chamber. Sad day. Moved to a condo without a significant yard so I will have to wait until the next house to build another greenhouse
Really sad to read that.
@@edibleacres ah well, I ain’t dead yet 😀
Love the videos, love to you and Sasha. Happy New Year!
Same to you!
Of course your supervisor approved; you made a warm bench for him to sit
Happy new Year!
🎉
Happy new year 🎉✨ 🥳
Same to you!
Terrific system.
We'll have to see!
Very interesting topic.
Nice to see this tech... so lost to so many of us and welcome to see. Can't help but think that nicer esthetics would be very welcome. Just my opinion
Always a joy😊 Thx
You need a insulating blanket on top and around the pile. Held down with a tarp for water proofing.
I think you are right :)
Oh, I'm so excited to see this! Thank you for sharing your experiment. In video #2, would you mind giving rough dimensions of your pile, greenhouse, and water tank? For some reason on video, everything looks either smaller or larger than it does in real life, lol.
Thanks, good note. You can check out the playlist of 'roundpole greenhouse' on our channel if you wanted to see a lot more detail on that... .Roughly 12' deep from house to southern side, 20' wide and 8' tall in that space. Tank is roughly 150-200 gallons, pile is 3.5' tall and 6' across... All rough guesses but gives you framework.
@@edibleacres Thank You!!
I'm so glad you mentioned Stanley's litter because I meant to ask you about that! I've got a lot of cats and kittens and want to switch from clumping clay litter and instead use something that I can just toss into my cold compost. Some of the stuff sold in stores use baking soda as an additive and I'm worried that cat urine and baking soda will be very alkaline over time.
That could be an issue, we just use sawdust which is straightforward and has worked really nicely.
I believe I would be more concerned about the bacterial composition first. You don't want any cross-contamination around your fruits and vegetables. Depending on the size of your compost heap, you may want to measure the amount of clay that you were adding to that Heap.
@@paulatwood998 I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn't mean that I'm already dumping clay clumping litter onto the compost. Oh, that would be a big mistake! I just want to switch to something that can be composted and THEN add that.
This is incredibly cool. Please post the temperatures when it's fully operational. Why did you not add more green material to the compost? The chicken manure has enough nitrogen to get it hot? Do you have problems from not turning the pile?
We didn't have any greens to work with at the time, and the coop had to be cleaned out so thats what it was built with. Should be able to provide the raw ingredients needed... We'll see and I'll share notes :)
@@edibleacres Awesome! Keep it up, absolutely love your work.
Dig a hole the size of what you got for your compost and deep enough, then you make it air tight with a lid on. you plug a methane collector to it and you can use the gas to cook your stuff or whatever.
Go check out solar air heaters/coolers made from soda cans,well worth a look, amazing results.Could be a great addition. Keep up the great work 🌞🌱🌳👍😆
I'm planning on saving windows from a local school that will be demolished next summer, to build a greenhouse half dug into the ground for some passive warmth... I think I'll be adding a compartment for some composing. I'm not worried about smells since it'll be a separate building. But do you think it'll be a problem otherwise? (aside from taking space and inviting rodents)
Worth experimenting with. If you have compost inside think about using that space to put flats for seed starting, etc since there will be so much warmth!
Sean, I noticed that you put the pipe more around the edges of the pile than in the centre. Would the centre of the pile not be hotter? Great video as ever. Thanks for the great content. Cheers Alec
Likely to aid in finished product removal, by having it on the exterior you can dig into the interior safely when it's complete.
Great question(s)... I wasn't sure how much pipe I had and wanted gentle, easy arcs to lay in so I went this way. I suspect I will regret it and would have wanted even MUCH longer run of pex with a bit more oriented towards middle. We'll have to see...
Would copper pipe be better to conduct more heat than the plastic?
Almost certainly, but it would be fragile and this context is rough on the pipe when laying in and taking out so I don't think it could work.
@@edibleacres I'm just trying to figure out an even more efficient way - maybe another metal like that heavy duty steel pipe or a thick copper plate that everything sits atop. I love the concept of compost heating.
Would adding urine to the pile be an option for adding moisture?...I wonder if there would be too much nitrogenous material considering all of the chicken manure present?...Always love your thoughtful, rational and waste nothing solutions! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Always an option for sure, and I've used it extensively in other projects. In this case it isn't necessary, the pile had the ratios already strongly in the N realm...
Would using a free water tank from Craigslist or two help with your passive water heating. Paint the water tanks black, the sun will help heat the tanks when the sun 🌞 shines.
Stanley!
Very cool idea!
Hey I’m curious on what all you use in your deep litter system for your chickens? I have a base layer of wood chips with dried leaves on top along with some dried grass, it works well but I have to add more every week at this point to keep the smell down.
Looks like you are using mostly hay?
Mostly hay because we got a nice deal on it in the fall.... It's easy to lay down just a little over every days poops... It is a daily layering that seems functional for at least a few months at a time.
Does anyone know what diameter Pex is best or doesn't it matter?
I am using 1/2" here... Can't say it's best or worst, just what we have...
Ah, you should not use dc current from the solarpanel to make heat directly. Install a Air to Air heatpump in the house and use the solar to power other stuff (like the freezer) in the house.
Always interesting to watch how you evolve your compost heating system!
Hi i watched dirtpach heaven and she does the samething using hotbed heat but in the green house isnt be better to do easier job in winther and chicken and rabits also can use it
In the right context the compost pile in the greenhouse would make a ton of sense.
As always you put my old grey cells to work. I wonder what would happen if you used an air compressor to blow more oxygen into the pile. Can you use it to build a compost pile way bigger, can you regulate the heat generation with the amount of air pumped in? What if if you preheated the cold outside air by a very long inlet buried way below the frost line in the soil in order to tap into the "constant" temperature way below? What about extracting the heated CO2 rich air from the compost pile and how to put it to use? For me it's just brain gymn, I neither have the materials nor the stamina to put it to the test ... sorry ... best wishes from Holland
Neat idea, but I think the additional air work can be skipped if the pile has a really nice layer of sticks/debris at the bottom. That will allow air to naturally pull in from the bottom and then work up. This pile could hhave used more passive air setup, but it is still working quite nicely.
So cool to see this happening! In fact, I'm wondering how cool it is to start with. Just for eventual comparisons, did your thermometer get accidentally buried in the woodchips somewhere? Just curious how hot it is before the eventual precipitation gets the biological stuff really dancing in that pile. It'll be really hot to see that happen. I'll be wondering "how hot" though. Jean Pain may have kept it about 110°f for 11 months around that methane producing area, but Gaelan Brown mentioned that maybe 135° could knock out some weed seeds. Is my ocd kicking in yet, I wonder?
I didn't temp probe it because I'm quite sure as it was getting piled it would just be ever so slightly warm... maybe 60-70F. The update will show the real temp now, but looks about 135-160 at the top... Incredible how fast that happens, and certainly room for WAY more heat extraction...
I'd love to see excellent heat transfer and a pile holding around 100F... Feels intuitively like a sweet spot... We'll share mote notes.
Is there a specific reason why people don't put the compost pile IN the greenhouse, apart from not designing the greenhouse to allow for the space required?
Not sure why but I put one into our greenhouse in zone 5b last winter and love it! Using a geobin currently and that sucker is loaded with worms!
People do that, though it adds a much bigger human labor element because you have to pay more attention to things like moisture and be more vigilant about ensuring the pile doesn't invite anything unwanted to live in such close proximity to your plants.
Great idea if the greenhouse is not attached to home. We hope to heat our home with excess heat from the greenhouse and I don't want those odors/gasses in our home...
Sean, I am planning to put a hot compost pile inside my greenhouse for next winter. Is there any reason this wouldn’t work or be advisable? Cheers Alec
Some worry about hydrogen sulfide and other offgases but I think the worry is overstated, especially if you build your pile properly and turn it. H2S is from anaerobic decomposition much more than a properly aerated compost pile.
In our case the greenhouse is attached to the house... The smells would not work for us. If it was standalone I would explore it more.
could you just build a compost pile inside the greenhouse if you had the room?
I'm guessing the smell is the main motivation for keeping it outside.
@@luciduous yeah, it's one thing to have a compost system inside a greenhouse that's in your yard but a greenhouse attached to your house? Nah.
9 degrees in Northern AZ....yikes!
That is super tough.
I think that you will get less heatlosses if you form walls around the pile. A sphere have the least surface area compared to volume, but a cylinder is more practical to build, and to transfer o2 into. I think a cylindrical Johnson su style bioreactor with reinforcement mesh/ tarp as wall would be better, but skip the airholes (its winter, less activity).
Thanks for your notes!
I wanna do one the size of a house, and make a jacuzzi!!!
Ha!
Would you consider adding urine to your pile for heat? I have seen this with a few other compost projects and it seemed to be helpful. Yt:David the good and dirt patch heaven.
I have used 5 to 10 gallons on a compost pile for heating a outdoor shower. It heated up to 160 pretty fast. the water came out at 130. This was a home school science fair experiment my son and I put together.
Definitely would if the pile started drying out or cooling off, but right now it is screaming hot, no need!
Pex is a poor conductor of thermal energy. You might consider getting black pipe, or copper if you have the scratch. You can make a very inexpensive heat exchanger with black pipe. I would still use pex as the transfer piping but you'll get a much better heat transfer with less distance/surface area with a metal surface.
You could also get an old truck radiator and bury that in the middle of the pile, that would remove a large volume of btu's.
Great notes, thank you. When I'm ready to improve this design I'll keep in mind for sure.
Stanley contributed in a few ways…
Yep :)
Do you have problems with rats?
He answered this question in a video FAQ he did a while back. The answer is: yes rats are around, no they don't pose a problem and he considers them a part of the cycle. Chickens will snatch small rodents if they find them, and rats don't actually cause any problems for compost piles. They aerate the pile and add organic material. As long as they aren't coming into your house it's not a huge deal. For those of us living in busier suburbs, preventing rats can be more important. But this pile he shows here doesn't have much in it that rats would be attracted to (aside from a warm home). Kitchen scraps will do that a little more.
Happy New Year!