Wood Pellet Boiler Produces Heat from Waste Sawdust
Heat for the Harris Center is supplied by our wood pellet boiler. This is the first wood pellet boiler installed in a public building in New Hampshire. This is a multi-heat variable output boiler, maximum rated at 146,700 BTU. Wood pellets burned in the boiler are made only from sawdust, a recycled waste product of our renewable forest industry.
The pellet boiler burns at 90% efficiency. We burn an average of 23,000 lbs. of pellets a year to heat our 10,000 square foot building. The cost has been about $1700 a year. If we had heated the building with #2 fuel oil, at a current price of $2.29 a gallon, our annual heating cost would have been $4220 a year. Burning the pellets for one year resulted in 126 lbs. of ash that fit nicely into a 29 gallon trash can.
The wood pellets are bought in bulk (from New England Wood Pellet) and stored in an external 18’ high silo. A flexible auger delivers those pellets to the boiler’s 12 cubic foot fuel hopper automatically as needed.
New England Wood Pellets: www.pelletheat.com
Tarm, USA: www.woodboilers.com
