3 ms·

I wonder how difficult it would be to use this concept to heat a room.

• LinuxBender 5y ago
  This is indeed done for heating some greenhouses. You put the compost boxes next to the greenhouse and the greenhouse wall has a wire mesh and a sliding panel to control the heat exchange. Contact temperature can be 90+ degrees Fahrenheit / 32+ degrees Celsius. You can take it a step further and run large diameter pipes under ground 150+ feet or 45+ meters to bring the circulating ambient temperature to around 50 degrees Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius as an easier starting point to heat up, then recirculate some of the air with solar/battery powered fans. Directly heating a home in this method would not be ideal due to the gasses emitted from the compost. You would need an inductive method such as water or coolant shedding some of the heat from the compost using coils in glass to protect the coils. Between geothermal piping and inductive heating, you could probably raise the home temperature enough to bring the cost of the supplementary heating down significantly, assuming a small home.