Jean Pain's Natural power plant. Why isn't this more well known with homesteaders?

I saw this video and got inspiration from it. Unfortunately, I am to old and broken to persue it. I believe that this could be a viable option for those in this community. I think this should be spread, especially in areas where homesteaders are building communities. This could be scaled up, if the community can come together and work together. Maybe I'm just an old fool.

I've seen this myself, shopping at HomeDepot, and placing my hand on a few of their bags of compost.  I could feel the heat in them.  So yes, it works.

Notice though the great size of the the piles, and the diesel-powered equipment used to construct it?  If you live next to a sawmill, you might have access to enough raw material to make it happen?  Homesteaders like me would be hard-pressed to find the cubic yards of material needed to build this?

i dont believe any one could make and run a jean pain system work other than the man himself, he unfortunately passed before his vast amount of experience could be recorded and explained better , there are better sources of information , of his work and translations of a book ,some home film footage ,interviews of himself and some decades later of his brother still working the garden he created.

Ben Mosley wrote:I saw this video and got inspiration from it. Unfortunately, I am to old and broken to persue it. I believe that this could be a viable option for those in this community. I think this should be spread, especially in areas where homesteaders are building communities. This could be scaled up, if the community can come together and work together. Maybe I'm just an old fool.

I remember being fascinated by the Jean Pain story and the idea of the large biomass pile. The video actually lays out pretty well the problems you run into. Some of the issues i found that kept me from going for it:
Size: it does not scale down well so was more suitable for a community or large greenhouse complex or something similar.
Equipment: it requires a chipper shredder to get the mass at the right size so it breaks down at the right pace to allows oxygen into the pile to allow break down and heat release..
Climate: Jean Pain's work was in southern france so his need for winter heat was minimal, the pile would probably not freeze in my climate but the rate of decomposition would slow to a crawl in winter
Labour: It is extremely labour intensive for the quality of energy you get from it. I figured a day of labour making firewood would be the equivalent of 5 or 6 days of work on the pile.
Technology change: Very cheap solar panels provide far more electricity than the pile could provide, technological developments like an RMH can produce massive more amounts of heat from the small wood feedstock with much less labour input using far less machinery.
Possible environmental problems: in the 1980's I read reports of leeching into the soil of concentrates which would affect groundwater similar to what a manure pile produces.  My own concern was you are creating basically a self contained bog which releases vast amount of CO2 and Methane far in excess of what smaller distributed piles would release. You are tapping the surplus heat but at what cost? All that said I always wanted to build one to experiment.
Its a great idea especially  an end product of large amount of compost.  My take was I was better burning the larger wood that would have been chipped for heat, composting the green mass from the tops of the trees, using solar to replace the methane he was burning in a generator for lights. Same idea; energy independance, different tech, less labour. Different answers for different regions.
Cheers,
David

Jean Pain s motive i dont think was to just create hot water and use the methane from his mounds ---these were the side effects /extras/bonus of the process---he wanted  to reduce the annual fires through the section of forest he managed and change the old methods of the past , the forest was thinned out and trimmed ,firebreaks maintained and this material was usually heaped up to be burnt or just left on the ground---he thought that instead it should be composted down --on a large scale and the end result returned back onto the forest floor ---improve the soil and retain moisture ---reduce fire risk at the same time---section by section of course ---a lifetimes of work for anyone--but it was to hopefully introduce a new practice of forest management for the future----being frugal and not wanting to waste or ignore the mounds other potential plus his ability to tinker and homebrew engineer led on to the hot water and methane---check out his methane gas powered citroen 2cv van --a compresser was used to fill a welding gas "bottle"---diy style ----and strapped to roof----madman genius