Posts Tagged ‘alternative energy’

Simple Arithmetic for Residential Heating

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

By Dutch Dresser

On March 13, 2012, the Mass Energy Consumers Alliance website reported average Massachusetts heating oil prices to be $4.12/gallon. In Maine the government website on March 12, 2012, reported a statewide average price of $3.86. Assuming these to be the new baseline oil prices from which future increases will grow, it is interesting to look at some options for ordinary homeowners.

It is common for us to get calls from people whose homes are currently burning 1200 gallons per year. It is also common for many of those people to find it difficult to manage cash payment for the installation of a new renewable energy heating system in their homes. Even with the cost of commonly available financing, the savings associated with heating those homes using wood pellet central heating systems instead of oil-fired systems are significant.

At $3.86/gallon, a house burning 1200 gallons of oil would spend $4,632 a year on oil if there were no finance or carrying charges added onto the cost of fuel.

Loose bulk wood pellets delivered by Maine Energy Systems directly to the residential storage unit would provide the same heat from 10 tons of pellets for $2,390 with a price that is guaranteed through June 30, 2014.

A 20KW MESys/OkoFEN boiler system with a 3-ton storage system would serve this home well and would cost about $18,000 all installed. For many homeowners a cash expenditure of that size would be difficult. However, if the homeowner financed the system with a 20% down payment ($3,600) at a rate of 4.5% for a 15 year term, monthly payments would be $110.16, or $1,321.92 for the year.

That makes the total annual expenditure for heating fuel and payment for the brand new heating system $3,711.92, or $911.08 less than the same heat using #2 heating oil at today’s average oil prices in the old oil-fired system.

The pellet fuel price advantage is very apt to improve over time. The Mass Energy Consumers Alliance website provides the following heating oil prices for the March 15 over the past three years:

  • March 13, 2012: $4.12
  • March 1, 2011: $3.77
  • March 16, 2010: $2.86

Maine Energy Systems loose bulk pellet prices for the same period:

  • March 2012: $239/ton ($1.99/gal oil equivalent)
  • March 2011: $235/ton ($1.96/gal oil equivalent)
  • March 2010: $280/ton ($2.33/gal oil equivalent)

It should be noted that the current price of $239/ton ($1.99/gal oil equivalent) is guaranteed for new MESys boiler customers through June 30, 2014.

The trendlines are clearly different.

Dutch Dresser is the Managing Director of Maine Energy Systems in Bethel, Maine

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Three year heating fuel price freeze!

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

$100+/BARREL OIL? WOOD PELLET HEATING COMPANY GUARANTEES THREE-YEAR FUEL DELIVERY AT EQUIVALENT OF $1.99/GALLON

BETHEL, Me. (Feb. 24, 2011) – Global energy demand, instability in the Middle East and concerns over the strength of the U.S. dollar are combining to send oil prices in one direction: up. Some oil analysts believe home heating oil prices could reach $4.00 or more per gallon in the near future.

Fortunately, Maine and New Hampshire residents and business owners within a 150 road miles of Bethel, in Maine’s Western Mountains, or within 60 road miles of Ashland, Maine, have an alternative: wood pellet fuel, providing heat at a price that’s equivalent to $1.99 per gallon of fuel oil, guaranteed for three years.
That offer is made by Bethel-based Maine Energy Systems, which distributes pellet-fired boilers for homes and commercial spaces. Its new “Northeast Affordable Heat” program, using pellets from four Maine manufacturers (Corinth Wood Pellets, Geneva Wood Fuels, Maine Woods Pellets, and Northeast Pellets), is available to the first 1000 customers who install Maine Energy Systems boilers under the program.

“Pellet heat will be a strong player in Maine’s future,” said Harry “Dutch” Dresser, Managing Director of Maine Energy Systems. “Pellet central heating is as easy and dependable as traditional heating systems, and it uses renewable resources that are plentiful right here in Maine.”

Northeast Affordable Heat guarantees that customers will pay no more than $239 per ton for bulk-delivered pellets through June 30, 2014. There are minimum bulk delivery quantity requirements, and the fuel price guarantee is offered only for use in new installations of Maine Energy Systems equipment. Some other restrictions, which can be found on the Maine Energy Systems website, apply.
“When most people think of pellet heat, they think of stoves and bags of pellets,” said Dresser. “Maine Energy Systems pellet boilers replace oil or gas-fired boilers and tie in with existing forced hot water systems, with significantly lower fuel costs. “

With pellet boiler systems, the fuel is delivered in bulk and feeds into the boiler automatically, just as with an oil-fired system. Maine Energy Systems currently has boiler systems installed in homes, schools, municipal buildings, and substantial commercial buildings.
In addition to reduced fuel costs for consumers, the engineering, fuel production and distribution networks – and the jobs they create – are all located in Maine.

Maine Energy Systems was founded in early 2008 by Les Otten, Dresser and William Strauss.

-maineenergysystems.com-

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Posted in Bulk pellet distribution, Commercial pellet boilers, Fuel consumption, Pellet burners, Pellet fuel, Wood pellet boiler | Comments Off

Domestic hot water from summer pellet burning

Monday, September 14th, 2009

In the interest of full disclosure the author is a Director of Maine Energy Systems.

I am often asked what I do about domestic hot water in the summer since my house is heated with a MESys pellet boiler system. The answer is, “I burn some pellets” just as I have burned some oil to create hot water for decades.

The follow-on question is always, “how many wood pellets does it take?” In a single case sample, my own, I have found an answer. Three adults live in my house full-time, one a college-aged son who loves long showers. We have frequent overnight company, including the families of four of our older son and our daughter. We use a washing machine and dishwasher as anyone does, and we’ve made no particular water reduction modifications to our house so our hot water consumption is probably typical for Americans like us.

My system contains an indirect hot water tank, which I keep adjusted to 180F during the heating months. During the non-heating months, I’ve reduced that setting to 120F, so the boiler fires at low level or in “keep alive” mode most of the time.

This summer, since the end of the heating season, I have averaged 20 pounds of pellets/day for the heating of water using my MESys 4000/Janfire system. At $270/ton that places my average daily hot water costs at $2.70, or the cost of a bit more than a gallon of #2 heating oil.

Ideally, I would have solar panels on my barn roof to further reduce combustion of any sort for the production of domestic hot water, but that will have to wait a bit.

Dutch Dresser

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Janfire NH burner reconfiguration

Monday, June 22nd, 2009


In the interest of full disclosure, Dutch Dresser is a principal of Maine Energy Systems in Bethel, Maine. Maine Energy Systems distributes the Janfire NH burner discussed in this post.

As those who’ve read my posts will know, I’ve enjoyed my MESys 4000 system this past winter, and I have experienced no significant issues with the Janfire NH pellet burner that fires the Bosch cast iron boiler. Nonetheless, others have experienced different issues with their systems, so all burners in the field have been receiving a system reconfiguration this spring to eliminate known weaknesses. I had my burner done last week, one of the last to receive this reconfiguration.

Peter, the Bosch tech, removed the burner from my house, took it to our MESys facility, and performed the necessary reconfiguration. This included a full inspection, the replacement of two temperature sensors, one in the drop shaft and one in the burner bowl, and the installation of new processor software.

Once the burner work was complete, Peter gave my boiler a thorough cleaning, including the flue vent. While cleaning the boiler, Peter discovered that the refractory insulation in my pellet boiler door was cracked, so he replaced it. He also ensured that there was plenty of insulation above the burner aperture. This reduces heat to the drop shaft temperature sensor. It is that sensor that would detect any burn back issues, so keeping it cool prevents any false positive readings.

Any reluctance I’d felt earlier to having the burner modified, I soon lost. Peter did a great job. The burner continues to operate beautifully for me, and seems to spend even more of its time in either “keep alive” or “waiting” mode now that it just heating domestic hot water. I’m anticipating somewhat lengthened cleaning cycles this summer.

I continue to find the transition from oil to renewable, locally produced wood pellet fuel for heating my home a satisfying experience.

Dutch Dresser

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It’s just different…

Friday, March 13th, 2009

In the interest of disclosure, I am a principal of Maine Energy Systems, distributors of the MESys wood pellet fired boilers.

I’ve now been through the heart of the Maine heating season with an undersized pellet boiler in my house, and I’m always prone to reflect upon changes like that.

In simple summary, when comparing heating with oil to heating with wood pellets, I’d say it’s just different.

I’m a pretty typical American. I got just a little bit interested in our home heating system four years ago when it was time for a new system. The beautiful Buderus oil boiler tickled me, and I was fully impressed by the substantial savings in oil consumption I enjoyed over use of the old Burnham that it replaced. That fascination consisted more of looking at fuel bills than of looking at the boiler…it required none of my attention and got none.

When the MESys 4000 went in my house last fall, I was fascinated with it for technical, economic, and environmental reasons. It was a mechanical thing that I could understand just by looking at it. As the winter went by, I learned about not just the little boiler, but also about our family’s heat using patterns and how they can be seen in circulating water temperature.

Because I was intrigued by the boiler, I checked it often, noted the modulation level it was running at and the water temperature it was maintaining relative to the target. I listened to it through its various modulation levels, through start up, and through the ashscrape cycle. I got so I could tell what it was doing by opening the cellar door and listening. For me that was fun.

I also learned about its needs relative to cleaning. I started out cleaning out the boiler pretty often, just to get an idea about how the different pellets were burning. When I decided to let it to until ash stopped it, I learned that with the pellets I had a ton of pellets burned would surely stop it. I fell into the habit of cleaning it out every other Sunday afternoon; it took a half hour, and I kind of enjoyed it.

Over the course of the winter, I took great pleasure in looking at my small, newly lined, chimney and noticing only hot air coming from it while nothing came from the large front chimney where the oil boiler vented.

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, my boiler is decidedly undersized for my house at 51,000 BTU/hour for a house with a calculated heat loss of 106,000 BTU/hour. My small boiler heated my house and my domestic hot water to comfortable levels all winter except the days when the temperature dropped below -5F. During those days, the oil boiler would “help out” when boiler water temp dropped below 140F, a completely arbitrary set point I chose. Today, I decided that I wouldn’t be burning anymore oil this year, so I asked my oil dealer to top up the tank while prices are low; I’m afraid they were upset to put only 41 gallons in my tank. With those 41 gallons, I received 7.4 tons of pellets and have approximately 2 tons in my pellet storage bin. That puts my fuel consumption at the BTU equivalent of about 690 gallons of oil, for the October to mid-April heating season. That is lower than usual despite a cold winter. I’ll have to wait until I can compile a calendar year’s worth of data, but it appears at this time that the manufacturer’s assertion that a boiler which is working at capacity most of the time is much more efficient has proven to be the case in my situation.

Now when I talk to people about central pellet heat, I always make it a point to say, “it’s just different” than heating with oil. You will have to understand your heating system a bit; you will have to clean the boiler from time to time (for me every two weeks); and, you’ll become much more aware of how your using your burning fuel.

I like it, but it’s just different in a pleasant sort of way.

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There is a limit…

Friday, January 16th, 2009

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Last night the weatherman on television was delighted to be able to report that we would see low temperatures like we haven’t seen for years.  In some ways, this was good news to me; I’d get to see how the little pellet boiler would do in our big, old house in very cold weather.  Not wanting to risk any frozen pipes, I adjusted the AquaStat on the oil boiler to kick in if the water in the system dropped below 150F.

Today's temp

Today's temp

At 6:00 a.m. today, my thermometer said -30F.  The house was at the temperatures we customarily keep, and the kitchen was cool, as it generally is during hard cold snaps.  There is insufficient fin tube in the kitchen to heat it effectively in very cold weather and it faces northwest.

I heard the oil burner kick on and run for about five minutes indicating that water temperatures in the system had dropped below 150F.  When I go up, I checked the systems, and the MESys 4000 had a boiler temperature of 172F despite the fact that all five zones in the house were calling.

Showers, morning dishwashing, and keeping up with the house dropped the water temperature below 150F once more giving the oil burner another four or five minutes of catch up.  For the balance of the day, no oil burner time was required, and the house stayed at its usual temperatures.

I gained confidence that the little boiler would have kept the house from freezing on those conditions, but layered clothing would also have been a good idea.

Dutch Dresser

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A pellet’s a pellet, right? Well, sort of!

Friday, January 9th, 2009

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In the interest of disclosure, I am a Director of Maine Energy Systems.

Wood pellets

Wood pellets

Burning wood pellets for home heating is a wonderful way to reduce one’s carbon footprint.  Wood pellet fuel is considered by scientists to be a carbon neutral fuel because the carbon released during combustion is in the active carbon cycle.  Trees gather carbon from the atmosphere and release it when they decompose or are burned.  In fairness, the fossil fuel used in the production and transportation of wood pellets makes them closer to 70% carbon neutral when their full life cycle is considered.

Burning pellets requires that appropriate quality pellets be used for the burning appliance.  Sophisticated pellet boilers should burn premium quality pellets, while mills can use much “dirtier” industrial pellets. There are many measurable attributes of pellets, and they have all been carefully measured by the Europeans for years as they’ve burned pellets in increasingly sophisticated appliances.

As we deliver pellets in our bulk delivery trucks to pellet storage bins and burn them in our Bosch/MESys systems with their Janfire NH pellet burners, we learn more and more about how important the various attributes of pellets are.  Let’s talk about a few simple ones.

Moisture content: Under the standards proposed by the Pellet Fuels Institute, a voluntary manufacturers’ organization, moisture content for premium pellets must be equal to, or less than, 8%.  The Swedish burner manufacturers with whom I’ve talked think that we’re a bit wasteful drying the fuel that much.  Most European standards call for 10-12% moisture in premium pellets.

Pellet Heating value: Measured in BTUs/pound this value is presented various ways:  as received, moisture free, and moisture & ash free. As received values will commonly range between 7,500 BTU/lb and 9,000 BTU/lb. Generally, the higher the proportion of softwood in the pellets, the higher the heat value, an idea that’s counter-intuitive to cordwood burners.

Ash content: PFI proposed standards call for premium pellets to have 1%, or less, inorganic ash content.  This falls in the middle of European standards, which range from 0.5% to 1.5% ash content for premium grade pellets.  In practice, the home pellet burner will notice this attribute most.  The higher the ash content, the more frequently stoves or boilers will have to be cleaned.  MESys distributed pellets are under 1% ash, so boiler owners can expect to remove about 20 pounds of ash for every ton of pellets burned.  A MESys 6000 can easily hold 40 to 60 pounds of clean ash.

Pellet durability: As pellets are handled some break.  Since delivering and automatically feeding pellets to boilers systems requires machine handling of the pellets, it’s very important that pellets be durable.  Regional manufacturers are beginning to understand the importance of high durability pellets and are modifying their processes to make harder pellets.  European standards, and proposed PFI standards, call for pellets of 97% to 98% durability when shaken in a standard test unit.

All of these things are of interest to me as I work to make central heating with wood pellets convenient for American homeowners; they needn’t be of much concern to homeowners as long as they purchase their pellets from a trusted, reliable source offering truly premium grade pellets.  Janfire burners will be carefully configured at installation for the pellets being burned using net heat value and pellet density information to produce the most efficient combustion possible.

Dutch Dresser

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First refueling with bulk pellet delivery

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

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In the interest of disclosure, I am a Director of Maine Energy Systems.

When my MESys 4000 (wood pellet fired boiler system) was installed and ready to run, we loaded 3,120 pounds of wood pellets carefully into the fabric pellet storage bin in my basement.  My bin is designed to hold 3.2 tons of pellets, but I took what was left in a delivery truck when the day was over.

MESys large delivery truck

MESys large delivery truck

The boiler ran well producing heat and domestic hot water as it burned pellets at the rate of roughly 100 lbs/day in very cold weather.  When the pellet burner indicated it had burned 0. 64 US tons of pellets (1,280 pounds), I removed the ash for the first time and marveled at how empty the storage bag looked. There were no pellets above the pyramid base.

I couldn’t help myself, I got out the tape measure and the old geometry book to try to determine the volume of the pyramid shaped base of the bag system.  The volume of the pyramid (6.6′ square by 3.3′ tall) proved to be 47.4 cubic feet, a volume that would hold nearly 1900 pounds of pellets. Sure enough, what was left and what had been consumed totaled what was initially loaded. It’s always fun when arithmetic works.

Fabric bin, 3.2 tons

Fabric bin, 3.2 tons

A couple of weeks later, Rodney brought the 20-ton delivery truck to my house, attached the hoses and added 5,500 pounds of pellets to those remaining in the bin.  The delivery took less than an hour and left me a bin mostly filled with pellets.  I shouldn’t need another delivery until spring is in the air.

Dutch Dresser

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Pellet boiler ash removal

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

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In the interest of disclosure, I am a Director of Maine Energy Systems.

After burning 0.64 tons (1280 pounds) of Energex wood pellets according to the data made available by the Janfire NH pellet burner on my system, I decided to remove the ash today to begin to get a baseline for proper ash removal intervals on my MESys 4000 system. The burner’s measurement is based on fuel density entered by the user; I entered 42.1 pounds/cubic foot based on weighing of several samples. An error in this setting would yield erroneous consumption figures.

In lab testing, the pellets I’m burning are reported to have 0.75% ash content, therefore, I was expecting approximately 9.6 pounds of ash. I opened the top and bottom doors of the boiler exposing the top of the cast iron core on the top separated from the lower chamber by removable baffles. After removing all the ash from the boiler, I weighed 12.6 pounds of ash, or nearly exactly 1% ash.

The bottom of the core was about half way up the bottom door with ash space below it. I found a small amount of ash on the cast iron and atop the baffles in the top section. I found a pile of clinkers below the burner resting on the inside bottom of the core, and I found talc-like ash in the bottom of the boiler enclosure. The clinkers were most interesting to me as they are the physical evidence of relatively low ash melting temperature (1250C) inherent in the pellets I am burning. We had been told of this attribute by the Swedish testing labs used by the burner manufacturers.

While the clinkers cause no issue for the burner or the system, they did keep some of the fine ash from falling to the storage area on the bottom of the pellet boiler enclosure. Until regionally produced pellets have sufficiently high ash melting temperatures to resist the formation of
clinkers, I will open the top door and remove the clinkers every half ton, or so, to allow for reasonable ash storage in the base of the system. After burning nearly 1300 pounds of pellets, there was ample room in the base of the boiler for lots more ash in this four-section boiler. The ash from more than two tons would have easily fit in the storage bin at the 1% volume, I discovered in this ash removal.

The recommended ash removal interval for the six-section boiler is every three tons of fuel; I’d be perfectly comfortable allowing 2.5 tons of fuel to run through this four-section boiler before removing the ash. However, the whole cleaning process, including opening the boiler, cleaning, and closing the boiler took me only twenty minutes, so I’ll likely empty it more frequently just because it’s easy.

Dutch Dresser

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Converting a house to pellet boiler heat

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

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In the interest of disclosure, I am a Director, and one of the founders, of Maine Energy Systems.

For nearly two years, I have worked with Les Otten and Bill Strauss to create Maine Energy Systems, a company introducing and distributing fully automatic, European, residential pellet boilers to the US market and establishing bulk pellet distribution systems to support pellet users. There are many stories to be told about the company’s creation which range from the importation of German/Swedish equipment to the design of trucks for bulk home delivery to the design and construction of pellet storage bins and to the design and construction of fuel distribution depots. I’ll tell those stories at another time. Right now, I’m obsessed by the new pellet boiler in my basement.

Our typical New England frame house was started in the 1840′s and put in its current condition 130 years later. It has 3600 to 4000 square feet of living area, including six bedrooms upstairs. It has reasonable windows and good cap insulation, but it not hyperinsulated. A heating contractor computed heat loss for the house at 106,000 BTU/hour.

For a couple of weeks a local heating contractor came to my house evenings and installed a MESys 4000, a four-section cast iron  boiler with the Swedish Janfire NH pellet burner manufactured by Bosch for Maine Energy Systems. Kaes, an engineer at the office, and I installed a 3.2 ton fabric storage bin in the basement in less than an hour and a half. About two weeks ago, we filled the storage unit with pellets and fired up the boiler system. The Janfire NH burner has many adjustable parameters to help arrive at efficient burning with different fuel qualities.

I set the known net energy and density values for the Energex pellets I was using, increased the ashscrape cycle time by 3 seconds, and left all other values at factory defaults when starting the burner. The system came up as it should and within twenty minutes was carrying the heating and domestic hot water needs of my large house on a day when the outside temperature was 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A later test of efficiencies on the modulating system showed 86% efficiency at low fire rates (30,000 BTU/hour) and 83% efficiency at high fire rates (51,000 BTU/hour).

This installation was accomplished and will be monitored through the winter to see if we can understand the European assertion that reducing common American boiler sizes by 50% when installing pellet boilers will meet heat and domestic hot water demands. Their claim is based on the continuous modulating operation of these solid fuel boilers.

Since the claims sounds a bit too good to be true to me, I’ve installed a 51,000 BTU/hour boiler in my house, which has been heated for the last four years with a new Buderus/Riello 215-5 oil boiler system producing 180,000 BTU/hour. I doubt that it can carry the house and domestic hot water needs during the depth of the winter, so I have installed it in a system including the 40 gallon Buderus indirect hot water tank, and the Buderus 215-5.

The Buderus is programmed to fire should system water temperature drop below 140 degrees Fahrenheit, bring the water temperature to 185 degrees Fahrenheit and shut down. In the two weeks the MESys 4000 has been running, the oil burner hasn’t run; outside temperatures have ranged from -10 degrees Fahrenheit to 25 degrees Fahrenheit during the period.

The information that’s available to the user to see fascinates me, so I look at this boiler several times a day and have learned lots about pellet heating and about my house that I never knew. I’ll provide lots more detail in future posts.

Dutch Dresser

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