For use in household appliances and lighting, producer gas must be pressurized. Historically this was accomplished with a device known as a gasometer. The target pressure for household appliances is 5-12 inches of water column (0.180-0.433 psi) while stationary engines fueled on gas have a target pressure of 7-11 inches of water column (0.253-0.397 psi). The principle of a gasometer is an inverted chamber with a water seal using a constant difference in internal water level and external water level to regulate the pressure. A small gasometer which stores and reliably pressurizes producer gas can be produced in a relatively low-tech environment.

Bio-gas is another type of gaseous fuel that is produced from biological material. Unlike bio-diesel or producer gas, it is produced entirely through biological processes. Human waste contains large amounts of bacteria which can continue to digest the waste if kept at a sufficient temperature and, in doing so, release methane. Some kitchen waste can be added to the bio-gas digester to be processed like the carbohydrates remaining in the waste matter. A typical setup would involve adding warm water to a drum containing the waste and keeping it at an elevated temperature until it stops producing gas. This digester process has the benefit of killing most pathogenic organisms that might have been in the waste, leaving relatively benign bacterial populations. The resultant slurry can be composted and used as a night-soil fertilizer.

If you’ve ever had a room like my bedroom with a good southern exposure with lots of windows you’ve felt how well solar heats. Even with the windows open, this room warms up so thoroughly that I’ve found myself having to close the windows and run the air conditioning to get the room below 80. In November.

It is possible to mitigate hot summers and cold winters a bit by using a few methods to allow sunlight to reach your house when it’s most needed and keep it away when it’s undesired. Deciduous trees or vines can be used to shade the windows, letting light and warmth through when they drop their leaves for winter. You can also take advantage of the differing elevation of the sun in the sky from summer to winter to set an awning that would block the sun during the warmest part of the day during summer, yet allow it all day in the winter.

In any instance, storing the warmth from the sunlight is essential to keeping you warm at night. Thermal mass refers to objects made of materials with relatively high specific heats, such as water, earth, or masonry, which, when exposed to sunlight during the day, absorb heat, reducing the extreme heat you’d otherwise experience in the day. At night, they release the heat as they cool. The thermal mass helps steady the swing of day-night temperatures that you’d otherwise experience relying on the diurnal phenomena for heating.

Solar heating can be collected in a variety of ways. Some alternative home designs incorporate greenhouse rooms for heating purposes as well as for raising plants year round. You can also use thermal concentrators, be they lens or mirror, to heat a working fluid, be it air, water, or antifreeze.

Whether you’re getting your solar heat through conventional windows, from the air in a greenhouse, or by solar concentration, a good way of extending your thermal storage capacity is to use the earth as thermal storage, a form of geothermal. By burying a series of lines in the ground, it is possible to store excess heat during the day and recover it at night. A Coloradoan constructed a greenhouse in the mountains which used a belt-drive 1/3 hp electric fan to force air through a series of buried corrugated plastic tubes beneath the building. Using just the fan, he was able to maintain a Mediterranean climate in the greenhouse year-round.

The more well known application of geothermal is to use the heat of the earth for heat or power. Absent local volcanic activity, this is generally impractical for our purposes. The most common use of geothermal isn’t the two I have mentioned, but rather using it to precondition air for your house. Eight feet below ground, the earth stays fairly constantly at the year-round average temperature. This is somewhat hard to look up directly, but you can calculate this by averaging your monthly highs and lows year round, which are commonly posted online in local climate data.

Everything you should know about batteries. Excellent video on battery tech. https://youtu.be/BRqRDZh74F0