Stand by your stove!

  • Active since 1995, Hearth.com is THE place on the internet for free information and advice about wood stoves, pellet stoves and other energy saving equipment.

    We strive to provide opinions, articles, discussions and history related to Hearth Products and in a more general sense, energy issues.

    We promote the EFFICIENT, RESPONSIBLE, CLEAN and SAFE use of all fuels, whether renewable or fossil.
jetsam

jetsam

Minister of Fire
Dec 12, 2015
5,337
Long Island, NY
youtu.be
Can you help your stove keep the house warm with the mighty power of farts? Let's see! (I honestly didn't know before I started this post.)

So an average farter puts out 500 - 1500ml/day. Let's call it 1000.

Farts contain 0-10% methane. Let's call it 5%.

Farts contain 0-50% hydrogen. Let's call it 25%.

Hydrogen is 0.09 kg/m3 at 0C, 1 bar.
Methane is 0.716kg/m3 at 0C, 1 bar.

Methane is 55.5 MJ/kg.
Hydrogen is 141.7 MJ/kg.

SO...

Your daily liter of farts contains .0000225kg of hydrogen.
Your daily liter of farts contains .0000358kg of methane.

Methane: (947 BTUs/MJ) * (55.5 MJ/kg * .0000358kg) = 1.88 BTUs.

Hydrogen: (947 BTUs/MJ) * (141 MJ/kg * .0000225kg) = 3.0 BTUs.

So, disappointingly, standing by the stove while you fart isn't going to warm the house a lot.

I was hoping for a funnier conclusion but the math didn't work out that way. :( Posting it anyway in case someone else wants to continue this important work.

BUTT: if we switch to a bean-rich diet and push our output up to 2 liters, and the methane and hydrogen content up to high-average, we end up with almost 32 BTUs total. If you need to heat a pound of water by 32 degrees.... you know what to do!

I do have to imagine that my dogs are helping heat the house with their farts, which are vastly greater than mine in frequency and, judging from the smell, are a lot more fuel-rich than mine are. They lie by the stove anyway, so you know that fuel is getting burned.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Ashful and 2fireplacesinSC
unless you heat with a bk then it's plenty for 24hrs:)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ashful and blacktail
Gonna start a new site. fartheat.com. Well, until smellavision makes its way into the Chrome browser.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jetsam, charger4406 and lsucet
jetsam said:
Can you help your stove keep the house warm with the mighty power of farts? Let's see! (I honestly didn't know before I started this post.)

So an average farter puts out 500 - 1500ml/day. Let's call it 1000.

Farts contain 0-10% methane. Let's call it 5%.

Farts contain 0-50% hydrogen. Let's call it 25%.

Hydrogen is 0.09 kg/m3 at 0C, 1 bar.
Methane is 0.716kg/m3 at 0C, 1 bar.

Methane is 55.5 MJ/kg.
Hydrogen is 141.7 MJ/kg.

SO...

Your daily liter of farts contains .0000225kg of hydrogen.
Your daily liter of farts contains .0000358kg of methane.

Methane: (947 BTUs/MJ) * (55.5 MJ/kg * .0000358kg) = 1.88 BTUs.

Hydrogen: (947 BTUs/MJ) * (141 MJ/kg * .0000225kg) = 3.0 BTUs.

So, disappointingly, standing by the stove while you fart isn't going to warm the house a lot.

I was hoping for a funnier conclusion but the math didn't work out that way. :( Posting it anyway in case someone else wants to continue this important work.

BUTT: if we switch to a bean-rich diet and push our output up to 2 liters, and the methane and hydrogen content up to high-average, we end up with almost 32 BTUs total. If you need to heat a pound of water by 32 degrees.... you know what to do!

I do have to imagine that my dogs are helping heat the house with their farts, which are vastly greater than mine in frequency and, judging from the smell, are a lot more fuel-rich than mine are. They lie by the stove anyway, so you know that fuel is getting burned.
Click to expand...
You need a different stove, BK is not doing the job for you. You're confused, your house is actually -77.;lol
 
Get that man a new and more productive hobby
Way too much time on his hands
 
Make sure your carbon monoxide detector is working. Might be a little squirrelly acting from too much CO ;)

Nah....I really enjoyed that actually. Maybe I’m a little weird with numbers but I think about such things as well.

Thanks for the post.

Stay warm!
 
My prior employer was looking at getting into anaerobic digesters for animal waste (AKA cowpower). The rule of thumb was the cow manure from one cow could be converted to 100 watts of power. I think a chicken was a couple of watts and pig was somewhere around 30 watts. An anaerobic digester is just an extension of the animals stomach. Some countries with big farm economies that also are tying to comply with global warming regulations are having a heck of time cutting carbon emissions as their farm animals are putting out a lot of methane which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. New Zealand was proposing a "fart tax" on livestock to use to pay for offsetting projects to reduce carbon emissions.A pretty much standard municipal and industrial waste.

A great reference to anerobic digestion which is what is creating the gas is the "The Compleat Biogas Handbook" by David House. Its self published and easy to read. It does have instructions on how to build small digesters but a key component is a source of year round heat to keep the process in the right temperature zone. I think InBev (Bud) has an anerobic digester in the Merrimack NH brewery. There are several CowPower plants in VT but they only really make sense for large dairy farms (1000 head) and get several upfront and ongoing subsidies. The power is almost a byproduct, the main use is it reduces the volume and BOD of the manure and allows the bedding to be recycled.

There are some small personal digesters used in tropical climates to deal with human and animal waste, they just tap the methane off the back end and use it for cooking.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jetsam
Even small farm-sized ones make a lot of heat and a lot of methane. Read a story about one farmer who paid $1.1m up front and was making about $150k a year on it, which is a ROI of 7.3 years. That's better than a lot of solar installations... and if the equipment lasts 20 years before he replaces it all, that's almost $2 million in his pocket to buy the new gear with. Link
 
jetsam said:
So, disappointingly, standing by the stove while you fart isn't going to warm the house a lot.
Click to expand...

From a a different thread...

jetsam said:
Doh, I think it is behind the treeline here. Briefly considered going up on the roof, but laziness won... plus I don't have any pants on and it's 20 degrees...
Click to expand...

It all makes sense now! ;lol
 
  • Like
Reactions: jetsam
There are a couple set ups where the whole farm is being run on methane from the cattle. Been awhile since I read the article - western states or Left coast area. Here in WI the landfills generate enough methane for their own use and then some , but last I heard WPL refuses to buy energy generated by them - whole bunch of excuses ( most of which boil down to unwilling to improve the grid to be able to do so)- even though they are supposedly mandated to do so by state Gov..
 
Landfill gas is much nastier stuff to burn. It has a contaminant called siloxanes that form something that looks like beach sand on the pistons of the engines that burn the gas. University of New Hampshire has a combined heat and power system that is fed from nearby landfill. There is fairly significant pretreatment system in place to deal with the siloxanes.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Ashful
Our county landfill has been tapping methane and converting it to natural gas for several years now.
 
peakbagger said:
Landfill gas is much nastier stuff to burn. It has a contaminant called siloxanes that form something that looks like beach sand on the pistons of the engines that burn the gas. University of New Hampshire has a combined heat and power system that is fed from nearby landfill. There is fairly significant pretreatment system in place to deal with the siloxanes.
Click to expand...
That's something I've not heard before. Almost all of our Long Island town landfills are closed and capped. They were all early adopters of "methane to electric" conversion, I think during the PURPA days in the late 80's, but have mostly shut down their onsite generators over the last 5 years. Now most of them are just flaring off the methane 24/7. The flame is so deep blue it's hard to see unless you're looking for it.
What you describe could be the reason for abandoning the onsite generators. Whenever I asked, the answer was just "no longer economical".
 
Unless the landfill was specially designed for gas generation, the amount of gas drops rapidly when the landfill is capped. At some point the cost to pretreat the gases and run the engine doesnt make sense and then they just flare it. There is an active landfill near me that has been flaring it for years.
 
vwmike said:
And here I clicked on this thread thinking it was going to be a bunch of selfies of members and their stoves :eek:
Click to expand...
Same here! But a lot more funny than I thought LOL
 
johneh said:
Way too much time on his hands
Click to expand...
If I’m not mistaken, his only stove is made by BK. Reloading once every 30-40 hours leaves lots of time to ponder.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back