In honor of Willi Hopfner, Lembach, Austria

A week ago, I had the great pleasure of visiting Willi Hopfner’s house in Lembach, Austria.  Willi is a municipal employee in Lembach with an energy passion.  He devotes much of his time and resource to reducing his family’s carbon footprint.  Willi drives a car he’s converted to electric drive with battery storage and an electric scooter. He has solar thermal arrays and a sun following solar PV array.  It’s quite likely that his spacious home is energy positive, that is, it produces more energy in a year than it consumes.  Willi could well serve as a model for many of us; he was awarded the “Energy Star Pioneer Award” this year at a World Sustainable Energy Days banquet last week in Wels, Austria.

I was in Willi’s basement in part to see one of the earliest installations of an ÖkoFEN Smart boiler with an integral Stirling engine based power generator.  Willi is field-testing one of the first installations of the Stirling equipped boiler outside the ÖkoFEN lab.  The 14KW (48,000 BTU) boiler produces enough heat for Willi’s house and domestic hot water needs when his solar thermal array can’t quite do it, but it also produces 1KW of electricity whenever it’s running at full output.  Micro CHP (combined heat and power) is the latest buzz phrase in home energy in Western Europe right now.  Concern about the impending shut-down of many nuclear plants in Germany has distribution of power generation becoming more common.

While in Willi’s basement, I asked Herbert Ortner, founder and co-owner of ÖkoFEN Pelletsheizung, if the large buffer tank in Willi’s system, and in pellet boiler systems in general, leads to increased system efficiency.  Typical of Herbert, he answered, “Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.”  He went on to say that a very well-insulated buffer tank very well installed with just the right method of return of water to the stratified tank can lead to increased system efficiency.  He followed that quickly with all the reasons that most buffer tanks actually reduce the efficiency of the systems they’re installed in.

Tank insulation must be extremely good to prevent standby losses that quickly defeat any gain possible through buffer tank use.  He talked about the lengths to which ÖkoFEN goes to prevent any air exchange over the actual surface of the buffer tank.

Plumbing to and from the tank must be well insulated to prevent heat losses.  The installation we were looking at had four large diameter water pipes between the boiler and the buffer tank and none were insulated.  Herbert noted that this installation would actually reduce efficiency of the boiler system but that was unimportant in this particular installation.  (Willi’s socks were trying to dry on one pipe.)

Beyond the obvious, the manner in which the tank is configured to create and protect thermal stratification of the water is important.  Water flow from the boiler to the buffer tank that mixes the stratified water can actually increase the number of starts and stops of the boiler, exactly the opposite of the design intent of the buffer tank in the beginning.

I left Willi’s basement with a greater appreciation of the insight of those who’ve been in this trade for a long while and have done the research to know that the real answers are complicated.  I also left it wondering why is it common for us to take near religious stands on such matters when we are only beginning to learn about them.

Do buffer tanks increase the average annual efficiency of pellet boiler systems?  “Well, sometimes yes, sometimes, no.”

Dutch Dresser is the Managing Director of Maine Energy Systems, a manufacturer and distributor of ÖkoFEN boilers and related equipment.

Throughout our schooling we hear about transitions. I remember particularly well the vivid picture my school history teachers painted of the differences in the American culture that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Such revolutionary scale changes make the history books, but smaller, interesting, transitions occur all the time.

These changes are easy to see in hindsight, but we don’t always recognize what’s happening during transitions. We’ve become accustomed to the blistering rate at which innovations occur in the technological world; new gadgets with new capabilities appear on the scene weekly, it seems. Only after time has passed and an aggregation of these technologies has worked its way into a population do sociologists and others begin to reflect upon their collective impact on our culture.

Over the past few years, something interesting has been happening in the local energy business. When Maine Energy Systems first began distributing wood pellet central heating appliances, most oil dealers sold and installed oil-burning appliances and delivered only heating oil.

With increasingly volatile oil prices and favorable propane prices more and more of these oil dealers became oil and propane dealers. As we began distributing an increasing number of pellet boilers, a few regional oil and propane dealers bought bulk pellet delivery trucks and began selling wood pellets along with their other fuels. Somewhere along the line, The Maine Oil Dealers’ Association changed its name to the Maine Energy Marketers’ Association.

Recently television advertisements in Maine show traditional vendors of heating oil, then heating oil and propane, then heating oil and propane and wood pellets, also beginning to sell electricity. It is clear that we are living through some sort of significant transition in heating in the Northeast.

This transition has a large number of precipitating factors that we can all see. The dramatic increase in the price of oil over the last decade has become incapacitating for many home and small business owners. Some are alarmed about the consumption of a non-renewable resource. A growing number of people are showing personal concern over the apparent global warming trend.

However, not all of the reasons for the differentiation of heating technologies in buildings in the cold Northeast are a result of fleeing from the once ubiquitous oil heat. More and more modern alternative heating technologies are becoming common and ordinary options to be considered when replacing old heating technologies or building new structures.

In the case of those who are adopting wood pellet central heating, there are two strong economic drivers for the change: personal and regional. Personally, those using the equipment buy loose bulk delivered pellets for just about half the price of #2 oil for equivalent energy content. Their personal savings are significant and immediate.

Regionally, pellets are best sold and consumed close to the point of manufacture. Therefore, spending heating dollars on fuel grown, milled, and distributed right in your economic region is extremely healthy for the local economy. As significant numbers of homes and businesses in an area begin using renewable, locally produced, fuel, the region adds jobs and enjoys heightened stability in its economy.

We are experiencing a heating transition in the Northeast. Heating options are available to today’s home and business owners that weren’t available less than a decade ago. Many of these options, including pellet central heating, reduce our cost of heating, reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, reduce our carbon footprints, and bolster the economy of our home state. These heating options are fast becoming the most common heating choices among people in the Northeast.

Harry “Dutch” Dresser is the Managing Director of Maine Energy Systems, a manufacturer and distributor of automatic pellet boiler systems.