Are you looking for creative ways to lower your energy costs, use renewable energy, generate more of your own power, or become less reliant on the grid? Energy expert Paul Scheckel offers practical advice for taking matters into your own hands. Understand the fundamentals of solar, wind, water, and biofuel energy production as you make your home ready for renewables. Each chapter of Homeowner's Energy Handbook provides a comprehensive discussion of renewable energy sources along with "green guides" for building your own energy-saving -- and energy-producing -- equipment. Step-by-step instructions show you how to build a bicycle-powered generator, a biodiesel processor, a thermosiphon solar hot-water collector, a biogas generator, a smokeless wood-gas camp stove, and more. Whether you want to button up your house to be more energy-efficient, find deep energy savings, or take your home entirely off the grid, this guide has the knowledge and skills you need to reduce your use, then produce!
Introduction
As I write this, I have just lit the fire on my first batch of homemade biogas. Food scraps and pig poop have been successfully transformed into a gas, similar to propane or natural gas, that we can cook with. Biogas is the combustible result of the decay that happens in nature just as easily as the sun shines or the wind blows. The challenges in harnessing these energetic gifts from nature lie in collecting, controlling, storing, and often transforming the primary energy resource into a form that can be used to meet a particular need. Much of this book is all about exploring the options for meeting your energy needs through natural resources, along with the processes involved in focusing their potential toward some particular need.
For years I've been fascinated with the idea of making biogas, but I was intimidated by what appeared to be complex and exacting science in the recipe requirements for optimum gas production. But experience is the best teacher and, after all, this simple process of biomass decay happens all by itself in nature. So how hard could it be to create the environment for gas to not only happen, but to actually be produced? I found a 55-gallon airtight barrel in the inventory (as I like to call it; my wife calls it something else) behind the garage. I dumped in a 5-gallon bucket of compostable food scraps and a smaller bucket of poop from our two pigs, along with a pile of grass clippings. Then I filled it halfway up with water and waited. One week later, combustible gas was bubbling out of the barrel no exact recipe or scientific calculations required.
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