After the end of our crowdfunding which has been successfully gathering support as much as 106% of the target, we continue striving to develop biogas digesters that will help farmers to get access to clean energy.
What is the Motivation Beyond this Experiment?
Together with staff and interns, we strive to find alternatives to replace cow dung which is the main source of biogas. We realize that not everybody has a cow to produce cow dung or either can easily find cow dung around them.
Throwback to Our First Experiment
Our first experiment was started in March 2019. In the first experiment, we tried to substitute the cow dung for the biogas digester with kitchen waste. Kitchen waste can be easily found in our surroundings since every household produces waste from cooking every day. However, if the family does not produce a large number of kitchen waste, they can pick up some from the market. It is what we did during the first experiment and we went back to the office with a bag of kitchen waste like fruit and vegetables.
The biogas was monitored regularly for two weeks. In this experiment, we were using Farming EM4 to get all the microbes needed to digest the substrate, but then we realized those microbes inside were not methanogens. Unfortunately, we were not successful in our first trial. We are still having some problems with developing metho. So far, the result still needs more researches and experiments.
Update from the Latest Experiment
We keep trying our best to find the best way to substitute cow dung with kitchen waste. At the second experiment, we focused on finding the right inoculant for it to work. We used balloons and bottle with various substance combinations like cow dung with water, cow dung with kitchen waste and many more to test gas that produced by each combination. However, we also find this method by using balloons is not the best one to test the type of gas.
Recently, on July 29, we re-started the experiment by combining cow dung with kitchen waste. Since we realized that the key finding of this experiment is to make the biogas produce the right gas which is methane, we still need cow manure as part of the combination to feed the biogas digester.
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