Solar CITIES ventures deeper into the sustainable tourism industry with this signature biodigester at the Lone Oak Lodge in West Virginia, and ecotourism destination run by and built with Brock Smith.
Brock writes that this sustainable tourism initiative, which has home biogas at its center, "is dedicated to pointing West Virginia in a new direction for economic development and a better quality of life for the state we love and the people we love!"
West Virginia's Basement Biodigester on the New River in Prince is the fourth one that Solar CITIES has built. We don't know if there are any others in the world, but each time we build one we get more and more confident that these "domestic dragons" belong in the house with us, like house pets, rather than banished to the "dog house" outdoors. We already expend a lot of money and energy insulating and heating our homes and since biodigesters need to be kept warm (being animals, after all, rather than machines!) it makes sense to "do this at home, in the home".
Besides being kept warm by being in the basement, this digester benefits from two additional heat sources:
1) PEX coils (100 feet per tank) inside the tank are connected to the water heater so that we can divert hot water through them whenever we want before it makes its way to the sink or shower.
2) The clothes dryer hot air duct first goes to the bottom of an insulated box that surrounds the digester tanks and then vents to the outside from a duct on the top of the box. This means everytime the dryer is used an envelope of hot air is created around the digesters.
2nd Basement Biogas digester in WV, 5th in the world.
While looking for relative information on indoor home scale biogas digesters for cooler climates in my home state of WV, I found your article on solar cities. If you're 1st in WV and 4th in the world then I am 2nd & 5th, respectively. Lol Installed & inoculated mine this past week (1st week of Oct., 2016). It is modular & scalable in both digester & gas storage tanks for summer & winter slurry supply amounts of feedstock and gas or in case something goes sour. I went with black plastic 55 gallon barrels simply because I can roll them out in the summer for free heat without having to build an active solar heat exchanger that would have to pump heat downhill or cold uphill into a digester at a windowless basement‘s lowest point. (Also, 55 gallon barrels because I can't get an IBC into my basement, lol.) I have a passive natural gas wall heater in the basement used to tale the chill out in winter so, I‘ll just roll the digester barrels toward or away to adjust temperature (the gas is stored separately away from the heater in a vented enclosure). Good luck in the future with your digester. A kindred spirit in WV, USA