heating your house with wabbits SOLAR.KnowledgePublications.com

heating your house with wabbits
20 apr 1996
one often-overlooked house heating technique is rabbits. put enough of them
in a well-insulated room, and they can keep it pretty warm...

page 9.12 of the 1993 ashrae handbook of fundamentals says that a 5.41 lb
normally active rabbit makes 39.22 btu/hour of sensible heat (and another
19.31 btu/hour of latent heat, ie water vapor), so if the room were say,
12 x 12 x 8' tall, with r20 walls and floor and ceiling and no windows or
air leaks, having a surface area of 2(12x12+12x8+12x8) = 672 ft^2 and a
thermal conductivity of 672/20 = 33.6 btu/hr/f, and it were 76 f inside and
36 f outside, one would need 1344 btu/hr to keep it warm, ie 1344/39.22 =
34.27 bunnies weighing 5.41 pounds each, making 7.25 btu/hr/lb of heat.

the ashrae hof also says that a 6.61 lb cat puts out 45.57 btu/hr, so one
would only require 29.49 cats, at 6.89 btu/hr/lb, to heat this room. or 
1210.81 mice making 1.11 btu/hr, weighing 0.046 lb, ie 24.13 btu/hr/lb. heat
output might exceed normally active levels, if one co-deployed both species.

larger creatures make less heat per pound, as varmint volumes increase faster
than surface area. people only make about 1 btu/hr/lb, even without fur.

off to texas,

nick

there are 89 institutions of higher learning in the philadelphia area.
what is the correct collective term for such aggregations? would they be
metaphorical facultative lagoons, which accumulate sludge in winter, and
decompose it in summer? or... "a constipation of colleges"?