Freedom Heating

Well it's simple, take a compost pile and bury a hot water hose through it, run pex tubing under your floor in your home, attach the two and fill with water...  With a few more steps of course.  It can be done using thermosyphon principles, or for real cheap using a pump of some kind.  It could get too steamy, and might have to have a shut off valve to prevent house from heating up too much, some piles get up to 300 degrees inside.  a good steady temp is around 160 at the core.  Piles of a cubic yard are easiest to heat for long periods, and perforated air tubing is hypothesized [in a Composting manual written by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden] to offer a pile that doesn't require constant turning.  So it's pretty simple.

Freedom lies here in my opinion, I find it with permaculture design principles and its' general mentality.  Save your leaves this fall and start your 50/50 compost piles, add water and watch it heat up within a couple hours.  Within a day or two it should be at operational temps.   Must be in a box in cold climes so that you can insulate it with...whatever.  Insulators that come to mind with me are: earth, straw, hay, wool, construction insulators.  I am building my first pile with wood chips [for browns] and kitchen scraps/manure  or millfoil from Candlewood Lake [for greens]  

Pictures to come by the way, along with more in depth testing throughought the fall, and of course, winter! I feel wood chips will take longer than leaves to break down and stop heating.  The greens will of course break down before the chips do, so may need to reload them once or twice per winter, first with millfoil, then later with manures as winter takes hold and green plants go hiding away into mothers warmth in the earth.

 awesome.  sorry I was not notified of your response and have not checked this page in a few weeks.  I have begun trials and so far the pex tubing is proven to be too expensive for my ability level, and am seeking alternative means to heat.  Right now is back to basics, using the ideals of a solar oven to focus light through windows.  Gets pretty warm.  Just using tin foil as a reflective surface, and cardboard as a backing.  Very simple to do, can be retrofitted to any south facing window, maybe east and west facing windows too.  this mentality, combined with compost (outside of house... unless you can seal/ventilate it in a way to prevent smell)  can heat any house I am sure of it.  compost provides boost at night, sun provides day heat, and if done properly is retained into most of the night.

We are also working on super insulating outside of the house with various materials, against the North Wall, to help retain heat and deflect cold north wind.

hey this is great, I'll be taking freedom heating on the road this Winter to South Dakota, maybe these will help there too, i sent the link to mb-soft.com to my Father and his brother, who will be staying behind to work on free heat in the Northeast US.  I'll keep people posted as it unfolds, so fars looking like cansolair style heat is winning the popularity contest in terms of attention grabbing, but I think compost heat has that beat in New England because of too much cloudcover.  In the end though, it would just make more sense to have underground houses, or earth bermed up on at least the north sides of homes, though straw bales/leaf bales could make some short term difference