heat your home for free with chipping/mulch?

[rapidlee]

has anyone ever thought of warming up the home shed with hose pipe or standard copper pipe in a pile of chipping with a water pump maybe powered by wind, pumping water around the radiators.

you could heat a farm house or something with space. when the chipping has dried it could be used in a turbine.

few problems, like leach and what to do with it. i thought you could have something like a small grain silo chipping fed into the top leach and chipps out the bottom.

why isnt this being doneor have i missed something????????

[David@rgm]

A friend of mine heats the water for his lambing shed in a similar way. Mucks out one of the cattle sheds and makes a nice big pile with about 50m of alkathene pipe buried in the middle. One end on to main supply, tap on basin in shed. Thing is, he is only using small quantities at a time. Rather like geothermal, I think you would need hundreds of meters of pipe in the heap to maintain the temperature but hey, anything that is free is worth a bit experiment.

[Justme]

Wont you get more heat & more control by burning it?

 

Muck heap heaters do work well but do need to be maintained.

[David@rgm]

with most of the chip produced by our work being green, I did consider running it through a second hand mobile grain dryer to get the moisture content down before storage and to prevent it heating in the shed. However costs were going to be prohibitive so back to having to chip designated seasoned lenghts. ho-hum.