Jean Pain Composting: Difference between revisions

The Jean Pain Composting is a method to utilize the usable energy, emerging from a composting process, to warm up a building. In most cases a big heap of chipped wood is created, and a water hose is fed though it, connected to a heating circuit of a building. During the decay process, performed by thermophilic microbes, the temperature in the heap rised up to 70°C. The water circuit conducts the heat energy into the building.

Jean Pain, the inventor of the method, combined aerobic decay of the heap with anaerobic decay in a sealed container in the center of the heap, thus producing both heat and biogas at the same time. The amount of produced biogas was probably too small for everyday cooking.

While the idea of using the aerobic process for heating purpose is used in several locations, mostly on demonstration facilities, the combination with biogas has not spread much.

See also

• Compost heater

Further Information on the Internet

• Jean Pain: France's King of Green Gold, 1981, by Nicolas Poulain
• Comite Jean Pain, Belgian organisation established to promote the methods of Jean Pain
• Another Kind of Energy or ComPost-Modernism, essay by Peter Bane for the Permaculture Activist
• A collection of articles innovating on the method, Build It Solar (magazine)