Heating a big building

You're in the size range where commercial wood chip systems start to make sense. Chiptec in Vermont is a more or less local source. There are a bunch of them in schools and industrial settings here.

Reggie Dunlap said:

I was thinking the same thing. In this case unlimited firewood is readily available so i think they will want to stick with a wood boiler.

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My neighbor and I always chuckle about our free wood heat as we unload split and stack, knowing that we'll be handling it all again to burn. Has the owner of this building ever heated with wood? It seems like after a season or two of cutting wood for a poorly insulated 15,000 sq ft building, windows and better insulation might become more appealing.

I think some of the bigger "Wood Gun" gasifier boilers can burn wood and also later be adapted to burn chips instead- that way you'd have flexibility.

I haven't done the math, but I sense that you'd be talking a completely daunting amount of cordwood to handle- free, cheap, or otherwise, in order to meet the kind of heat load you're describing.

I'd hate to invest in an option that locks you into cordwood only-- then find that you really want the option of chips.

If I had the vertical clearances for a Wood Gun with a chip feeder, I'd have seriously considered it (even though I only plan to burn cordwood), but my cellar is not tall enough.

If the wood is free, perhaps hire someone to take it down and chip it- that way you're making more use of tops, branches etc., too,

How easy would it be to add insulation? If fuel oil is ~$4-5/gal that would total $60,000 to $100,000 using your estimations PER YEAR. In addition, a wood boiler, radiators. exchangers etc for this large of a system would not be cheap either. I can not possibly imagine that even a retro-fit of high performance insulation would cost that much. I'm not saying that the wood boiler route is bad, but just not the first thing to do here. Remember, you still have to feed that boiler many times a day and stack/haul/handle etc wood. Your time is money too.

Coal boiler with automatic Stoker from large bin!

Garn, Econoburn, and Woodgun all have units around 1,000,000 btus. As stated before the Garn comes with storage and storage would have to be made for the others.

For the handling of that amount of wood, I know a guy that stacks the wood on pallets and tension straps them down. He has a tractor with forks and a pallet jack in the walk out basement. He only handles it once and then parks the pallets when needed next to the furnace for loading. He said the ease of operation was well worth the cost of the jack and tension straps.

With the money your guy will save on oil he should be able to pay someone to cut, split, load, etc the wood on the pallets and still make out better off.

Reggie Dunlap said:

What's the best way to heat a 15,000-20,000 sq. ft. hotel with wood? It's old, poorly insulated, and currently burns around 15-20,000 gallons of oil annually in northern NY.

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A million-btu Econoburn and a large storage tank.

What do they have currently? Boiler(s)? Furnace(s)?

Do they have space for a boiler and tank indoors?

Joe

It might be possible or even pratical to consider retro-fitting the oil boiler with a dual head pellet burner now under development at pellergy.com

PB-100 Wood Pellet Burner Sytem

Fully automated burner system capable of 350,000 btu/hr to 850,000 btu/hr output. The PB-100 is currently under development and will be ready for installations in summer 2009

I completely agree on the Garns- my neighbor down the road put in the "little" Garn to heat 2 houses + a shop, and it was what really introduced me to the extreme net efficiencies offered by gasification + storage. It seemed like overkill for me, and there's no way I could "fit" it without building a whole new building for it, which did not make sense for me. But now that I've gone down the road of a gasifier + finding/ building storage (which I still don't regret and makes sense for me), it's become really apparent to me that IF you have the ability to plan/manage the space of a Garn-type unit, then its extreme simplicity of having the burner and storage all in one, and not needing any circulation or management between them, is worth a lot. And the cost of a Garn really does not seem out of line compared to what you'd spend on a similar-BTU boiler plus similar BTU storage and all the stuff to hook 'em up (indeed, for the BTU levels involved, the Garn may be less, $ per BTU)

Reggie Dunlap said:

Any suggestions would be helpful.


Reggie

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Have your friend call Gary Switzer in Dundee NY 607-243-8689.
He won't regret it. I love my Switzer Custom Wood Burning System.

Reggie Dunlap said:

Right now they have two big oil boilers, and I'm not sure how many BTU's they put out. The new wood boiler would go into it's own building. I recommended they use two of the 400k BTU Garns. I like the integral storage so things stay as simple as possible. Two boilers would give the option of running either one or both depending on heating needs.

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With storage, there's no need to stage two boilers. If you have a million-btuh boiler, you wait until the tank is low enough to accept a couple million btus, then fire the boiler for a couple hours. Two boilers is just excess expense, once you have a storage system to buffer operation.

Joe