Says Andre Birre, author of Humus: Wealth and Health of the Earth, concerning the Pain method : “We are so hypnotized by the black gold we call oil, of which the supply is limited, that we fail to see that everyone can exploit that other gold-humus-not only without exhausting the supply, but constantly increasing it.”
I knock on the door and am greeted warmly by Jean Pain and his wife, Ida. Jean, I notice, has a wrestler’s build and a hermit’s calm. He accompanies me to about 50 metres from the front door and shows me the object of the world’s attention — a home-made power plant that supplies 100 per cent of the Pains’ energy needs. What I see is a mound, three metres high and six across, made of tiny pieces of brushwood.
This vegetable cocktail, Pain explains, made of tree limbs and pulverized underbrush, is a compost, much like the pile of decaying organic matter that people build in their gardens, using food scraps and leaves. Buried inside the 50-ton compost, he says, is a steel tank with a capacity of four cubic metres. It is three-fourths full of the same compost, which has first been steeped in water for two months. The tank is hermetically sealed, but is connected by tubing to 24-truck-tyre inner tubes, banked nearby in piles. The tubes serve as a reservoir for the methane gas produced as the compost ferments.
“Once the gas is distilled, washed through small stones in water — and compressed,” Pain explains, “we use it to cook our food, produce our electricity and fuel our truck.” He says that it takes about 90 days to produce 500 cubic metres of gas — enough to keep Ida’s two ovens and a three-burner stove going for a year. Leading to a room behind the house, he shows me the methane-fuelled internal combustion engine that turns a generator, producing 100 watts every hour. This charges an accumulator battery, which stores the current, providing all the Pains need to light their five-room house.
As Ida drives off in their truck, I see on the roof two gas bottles shaped like long cannon shells. These have a capacity of five cubic metres of compressed gas, allowing her to drive 100 kilometres. Jean says that ten kilos of brush-wood supply the gas equivalent of a litre of high-test petrol. All that is needed to use it as motor fuel is a slight carburettor adjustment.
We walk back to the compost. Jean points to a- 40-millimetre-thick plastic tube that runs from a well, through the heap and on to a tap inside the house. He explains that compost heats as it ferments, raising the temperature so that cold water, arriving from the well after passing through 200 metres of tubing wound round the tank, emerges at 60 degrees C. I personally confirm that the water arrives cold at the “cake” and comes out scalding. Once inside the house, the hot water circulates through radiators and heats the house. The compost heap continues fermenting for nearly 18 months, supplying hot water at a rate of four litres a minute, enough to satisfy the central heating, bathroom and kitchen requirements. Then the installation is dismantled and a new compost system is set up at once to assure a continuous supply of hot water.
