southern MN | Ducksoup - 11/21/2024 10:11
This is a curiosity question and I dont know if it would be practical to heat a house or barn or whatever you might need heat in.
Could you use a sileage pile to heat say pex piping that is looped through the middle of a pile? I know these piles generate heat..but thats the extent of my knowledge. Maybe this has been done and I didnt find it in my google searches, maybe its a stupid idea! My thought process went like this, lay half the pile down, put the tubing down, lay the other half down and cover. Hook the tubing up to a pump and a water coil or just some fin tubing. How long does the pile generate heat, and would the removal of heat be detrimental to the pile? Sorry if this seems like a dumb question or is posted in the wrong sub forum!
No. Silage doesn’t heat but a very little bit for a very short time.
You are thinking of a manure pile, or as others call a compost pile. Solids manure pile, with lots of bedding.
The pile needs to heat, so you have to match the size of the pile to the amount of heat you pull out of it. Probably best to be feeding a heat pump with the heat from the manure pile, the heat pump can better deliver the heat needed?
Depends where you are of course, here in MN need quite a pile to generate enough heat to withstand a minus 20 winter and still deliver useful heat to a building. It’s difficult to add to a pile and have it continue working when it’s that cold, so you need to start with a big enough pile that it can generate heat for months.
In a more moderate climate you can probably get a fair amount of supplementary heat from a pile.
There are 100s of YouTube’s about it, here is one:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8P7PXtqIyy8&t=481s&pp=2AHhA5ACAQ%3D%3D
His coil of pipe is way too concentrated, he would need to spread it out to contact more of the internal pile, as he rapidly cools down the area it touches and he runs out of heat.
But then his problem would become chilling down that small pile too cold and killing the heat engine….. would need a much larger pile.
He mentions collecting snow or rain water through his winter, so clearly he is not in a very cold climate. This is going to depend on the amount of heat you need. It becomes less practical the more bigger amounts of heat that you need, unfortunately. That compost pile is an engine, and can only put out so many btu per cubic foot of actively composting material it has.
Paul
Edited by paul the original 11/21/2024 12:59
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Can a sileage pile be used to heat your house?
