Weirdest Ways People Have Powered Their Homes

Nuclear power

If you were looking for the most dangerous thing to try at home, a good start might be experimenting with the technology that leveled Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl. As long ago as 1994, 17-year-old Daniel Hahn, (known as “The Radioactive Boy Scout”) was arrested while attempting to build a homemade nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed. He had succeeded in collecting and refining so much radioactive material that a geiger counter showed a dangerous background levels of radiation as far as five houses away.

But it’s not just secretive boy-scientists - today, home nuclear power openly experimented with by hobbyists around the world. Nuclear fusion - the chemical process that powers the sun - has been achieved by at least thirty amateurs. You can even find a step-by-step guide for creating your own fusion reactor on the website Instructables.

The problem is, no home hobbyist has yet figured out how to make fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume, meaning a Back to the Future-style Mr Fusion machine is still years away.

Sewage

Poo power could be our smelly future. Human and animal faeces contains a wealth of chemicals which could potentially generate electricity. It can also be used in a number of forms including biogas, and the unappetisingly-named “dried and charred fecal sludge”, which has properties similar to coal.

As a result, people have started using poo to power their houses. One house in Navarre, Spain, powers it heating, hot water and stove systems with sewage. TUnfortunately the humans in the house don’t create enough feces for the system to fully function - it only works if you include manure from four horses, which is not a solution your average city dweller could implement.

But, poo power does work well on a larger scale - one Somerset dairy farm sends enough electricity into the national grid to power 6,000 homes; and Bristol has rolled out poo-powered buses. Appropriately enough, they’re on route number two.

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Home oil wells

Oil wells are not particularly safe environments. After the first gulf war, hundreds of wells were set alight, and some took four months to be extinguished. And you don’t have to look far in popular culture for reminders of how dangerous oil extraction can be. Nonetheless, some people have absorbed this information and decided that home oil wells are the hobby for them.

There have been several reports of people who have created home oil rigs, including one person who claimed to extract three barrels a day in his garden. But what to do once you’ve drilled the oil? Powering a house would require a small oil-fired power station to convert oil into electricity; using the oil to drive a car would require a home refinery. Even storing the oil is incredibly dangerous - unrefined oil contains hydrogen sulphide gas, which according to one journalist who investigated the matter, “has a terrible propensity to evaporate from crude, knock out your olfactory capabilities, and slowly suffocate you to death.” So, if you have decided for some reason to buy or build a house on an oil field, we recommend you keep the drills in the toolbox.

Electric eels

As a power source, Electrophorus electricus have the advantage of creating ready-made electricity without needing any conversion through refineries or power stations. Their feed is also considerably easier and safer to buy than uranium-235.
Still, they are not the ideal power source. They produce high voltages for very low amounts of time, and are inconsistent in the amount of electricity they emit. Even so, one Japanese aquarium powered an entire Christmas tree using a single electric eel.
However, before you rush to the Amazon with a fishing net,, be aware that there are drawbacks. A US aquarium tried to power a Christmas tree, and found they could only power very low voltage lights using their eel. This would restrict the amount of home applications eels could fuel, unless a transformer was used...and even so, a huge volume of eels would be required before an entire house could be powered.

Something just as innovative, but less dangerous

You don’t have to make a nuclear reactor to power your home in an innovative and cheap way. Milkman Energy provides crowd-switches - bespoke and ultra-cheap tariffs for consumers who essentially buy their energy in bulk. This allows you to save hundreds a year on bills - all without the risk of blowing yourself up.

Our switches are free, fast and completely no obligation. For more information about our model see our homepage, or the video at the bottom of this page. To sign up to the next switch, put your postcode and email address into the box below