Skip to main content

This couple is building a poop-powered home

this couple is building a poop powered home toilet roll
Image used with permission by copyright holder
American Meghan Sapp and her Spanish husband Iñigo Arana may soon be tempted to add a little more food to the dinner plate, happy in the knowledge that once their digestive juices are done with it, the resulting waste will help heat their home.

The couple are building their poop-powered home just north of Pamplona in north-east Spain, with the project scheduled for completion early next year.

The initiative is being led by PlanetEnergy, a startup founded by Sapp four years ago to create small-scale systems for converting waste into energy, combining solutions with wind and sun power to eliminate energy costs, reported Madrid-based news site The Local (via Quartz).

Organic waste from not only the bathroom but the kitchen too will be converted into biogas to provide energy for under-floor heating, hot water, and cooking gas. At the same time, electricity will be generated via solar and wind power.

Sapp says that as the couple’s bathroom visits are highly unlikely to provide enough waste to take care of the farmhouse’s energy demands, they’ve bought a couple of horses to help them out.

“Horses eat a lot of grass, then they poop a lot and that’s great for making biogas,” Sapp told The Local, adding that the motivation for building the special house is “to demonstrate that it’s technically viable and economically feasible to be an energy island, no matter how small the scale.”

The cost of both the land and the building work, which should be finished by spring 2016, is likely to reach just over half a million dollars. According to Sapp, the technology costs equal around a fifth of the total outlay, though the expenditure should be returned through energy savings within four or five years.

If you’re a follower of poop-based projects, you’ll be aware that this isn’t the first time that waste of this kind has been used to create energy. Just last May, Geneva-based designer Océane Izard revealed a plan for converting dog do into electricity, while Detroit Zoo has already embarked on a project to build an enormous biodigester for turning elephant poop into methane-rich gas, which, if all goes to plan, could save the zoo up to $80,000 in energy bills annually.

Finally, last year saw the launch in the U.K. of a poop-powered bus. And no, passengers didn’t have to drop anchor in order to complete their journey.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Household electrical usage increased in 2020. Here’s how a smart home can help
data shows increase in household energy use 2020 sense home monitor feature 625x417 c

A report released by Sense has revealed that home energy usage increased dramatically throughout all of 2020. Of course, this doesn't come as much of a surprise -- with the quarantine and lockdown protocols ensuring most people stayed at home during this time, the average amount of energy used increased by 9.3%. This translated to an overall average increase of $127 by the end of the year, with the highest increase taking place during the spring and summer months.

U.S. customers overall paid an increase of $1.21 billion, but this added cost was not distributed evenly across the country. Five states in particular saw the highest increase in rates, with residents in New York and Massachusetts facing an increase three times that of Florida. As the pandemic spread throughout the country, demand for electricity continued to rise up to 22%.

Read more
Personal power generator harvests energy from the breeze you make when you walk
Walking

Wind power is an exciting and efficient method for generating sustainable energy. But while most of us aren’t going to be getting personal wind turbines anytime soon, a small device developed by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing promises to turn wind power into a personal energy generating solution -- by harvesting energy from the breeze created when you go for a brisk walk. Yes, seriously.

Rather than being a wind turbine, the device is a nanogenerator composed of twin plastic strips in a tube that moves when exposed to airflow. Through a process called the triboelectric effect, the two plastic strips brush against each other and generate an electric current. This is similar to the way that static makes your hair stand on end when you rub a balloon on your head. This current is then sent via silver electrodes to a miniature generator. While the wind-to-energy conversion efficiency is lower than an average wind turbine, it is higher than previous devices trying to do similar wind scavenging.

Read more
Wireless power over distance creeps closer to your home at CES 2020
GuRu wireless power over distance

This story is part of our continuing coverage of CES 2020, including tech and gadgets from the showroom floor.

I've been excited about wireless power over distance since the first live demo I saw five years ago. It felt a little bit like magic, as interesting technology innovations can do from time to time. There were already a number of players in the space back then, though few that could, or would, show you a working demonstration.

Read more