BETHEL, MAINE – Maine Energy Systems (MESys) today announced that it is on track to sell a record number of fully-automatic wood pellet boilers in the northeastern U.S. this year. Because of increasing demand, MESys has reduced prices on its AutoPellet 20kW boiler, which is suitable for residential and light commercial customers, by nearly 18%.
“High fossil fuel costs and growing consumer awareness of our wood pellet boilers have contributed to the strong 2013 sales,” said Les Otten, MESys’ co-founder and CEO. “We’ve installed hundreds of boilers over the last few years, and owners are reporting heating bills reduced by up to 50 percent.”
MESys, in partnership with the Northern Forest Center and Berlin Better Buildings, installed 36 of its boilers in Berlin, New Hampshire as part of a pilot program known as the Berlin Model Neighborhood Project.
“Berlin has the distinction of playing host to the highest concentration of fully-automatic wood pellet boilers in North America,” Otten said ”the boilers both reduced heating costs and greatly reduced the regions carbon footprint”.
The AutoPellet 20kW is designed to displace up to 1,200 gallons of #2 heating oil annually, and is built in Bethel, Maine, for the US market under license from Austrian wood pellet heating leader, OkoFEN. MESys also manufacturers larger sized AutoPellet boilers suitable for everything from residential homes to school districts.
Unlike a wood pellet stove, AutoPellet boilers are an automatically-fed central heating system and require no human interaction to operate.
According to Otten, “at today’s prices, a home burning 1,000 gallons of oil will spend between $3,500 – $4,000 on fuel annually. By switching to an AutoPellet boiler, the fuel cost would be $1,990”.
The company delivers locally-sourced wood pellet fuel throughout much of the Northeast at the price of $239 per ton and guarantees that price to AutoPellet customers through at least June of 2014.