A Beginner's Guide to Household Biogas
Household biogas turns daily kitchen scraps and bedding into a small renewable flame; here is what one backyard drum honestly makes, and what it will not.
Brown Energy
Field guides for powering your home and homestead on the brown economy.
Chickens, Goats, or Pigs: Choosing Your First Generation Herd
Choosing between chickens, goats, and pigs as your first biogas feedstock animal, weighing each one's honest daily output against the appetite behind it.
Digester Smells, Ranked by Urgency
Reading a digester by its smell: the odors a working drum gives off, ranked from routine to critical, and the one that means leave the drum now.
Could One Hippopotamus Run a Food Truck?
A field guide to powering a mobile kitchen on the biogas from a single adult hippopotamus, from digester sizing to the length of lunch service one animal can honestly sustain.
Miniature Horse: Pet or Peaker Plant?
Keeping a miniature horse as a low-capacity biogas peaker: the honest output of one small animal, dispatched for grid peaks, against its keep.
Seasonal Variation in Goat-Based Energy
The seasonal swing in a goat's biogas output: why one animal makes far more energy in the green season than the white, and how to plan for it.
How to Store Three Days of Emergency Methane
Banking a three-day biogas reserve against a grid outage, with the honest math on how much room three days of household methane actually takes.
Can You Cook Thanksgiving Dinner on Biogas?
Cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner on household biogas: the meal's honest energy budget, and the weeks-ahead banking schedule the day really requires.
Why Your Digester Has Stopped Bubbling
Troubleshooting a digester that has gone quiet: the common causes of a stalled drum, in order, and which are a quick fix and which a long wait.
Farm-to-Fart: Piping Biogas to Your Kitchen Stove
How to run a backyard digester's gas safely to the range — line sizing, water traps, scrubbing, and an honest accounting of what one drum will actually cook.
The Sewer-Source Heat Pump: Recovering Warmth From Your Own Shower Water
Reclaim the heat in graywater with a drain-coil exchanger and a small heat pump — honest coefficient-of-performance arithmetic and a shower schedule the whole household keeps.
The Maggot Battery: Kitchen Scraps to Chicken Feed to Eggs
A closed black-soldier-fly loop that turns household scraps into chicken feed and, a few steps later, eggs — with honest yields for a single homestead.
The Brown Home™ Operating System: Owner's Manual
Congratulations on your purchase; please read this manual in full before your first flush.
The Brownwall Powerwall: Thermal Storage in a Pile of Warm Compost
How to build a wall of warm compost that stores low-grade heat in water coils, with honest figures for how much warmth one pile will give and for how long.
Overwintering the Dungester 5000: Keeping Your Digester Warm Through Winter
A seasonal owner's guide to holding your Dungester 5000 at 35 °C through a real winter, and honest expectations for what a cold-climate drum will and will not produce.
Reducing Your Load First: The Cheapest Watt Is the One You Don't Use
The homesteader's guide to shedding and shifting your own household load before you add a single appliance — and to doing your part when the grid calls a Demand Defecation event.
The Backyard Digester: A Dungester 5000 Build & Commissioning Guide
Everything you need to build, seal, and commission a single-drum household digester, with honest expectations for what one barrel will and will not run.
One Elephant Can Power a Tiny Home (But Also Requires an Elephant)
A single adult elephant produces enough dung to meet the daily electrical needs of a lean tiny home — provided you can meet the daily needs of a single adult elephant.