small scale biogas digester

Well I have a question. I live in a very "horsey" area, and the thought/dream has struck me that some of their "produce" might be usable in some way. I live in an area near the Alps which gets cold down to sometimes minus 20 in winter. On a sunny day when the stables have been mucked out I often see steam rising from the fresh piles.

It strikes me as such a waste when I know that the people of yore in Wales where I come from originally, used to live in houses above the cattle in winter, to take advantage of their body heat. They'd also build "hotbeds" to exploit the heat from the rotting manure and grow veg earlier than usual on them.

I own a small conservatory. Are there any very small scale digesters which might heat it?

Roger,

rogertheshrubber wrote:
Well I have a question. I live in a very "horsey" area, and... I own a small conservatory. Are there any very small scale digesters which might heat it?

If you mean are there purchasable digesters which would be suited, then perhaps yes. See http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1408/ with regard to what might be a purchasable already-built digester. However, biogas is not presently what I would call an off-the-shelf option for very many of us. We get far closer if we are willing to DiY a bit. See, for example, http://en.howtopedia.org/wiki/How_to_Build_the_ARTI_Compact_Biogas_Digestor



d.