Winter in Vermont can mean a foot of snow or frigid temperatures with below zero wind chills. Sometimes we get both on back to back days. But inside the Vermont office it stays a comfortable 70-72 degrees thanks to the five boilers in the basement and the folks who keep them running. Two boilers are fueled by biomass (aka, hardwood chips) and the other three run on heating oil.
To help save money on fuel bills we try to use our biomass boilers as much as we can in the winter months, although the availability of woodchips has been an issue this year. A wet fall and early winter made it challenging for logging companies to get wood out, and the vendors who serve our area haven’t been able to keep up with demand. When it’s really cold and we have both biomass boilers running, we burn a full tractor trailer load of wood chips every single day.
For those of you who burn wood at home, you know there is some maintenance required. Burning wood creates ash, and the ash needs to be cleaned out periodically. Our biomass boilers are no different. Every day the ash in the biomass boilers needs to be raked down to the front of the burn chamber to an auger which moves the ash out and transports it through some duct work to a sealed dumpster in front of the building. The clean ash is a “hot commodity” for local composters. Speaking of hot, the attached picture shows Pierre Trepanier of the Facilities Team raking ash in Biomass boiler #1. The boiler temperature at the time of the photo was 350 degrees, and the rake is made of metal. Pierre’s words of advice: “Don’t forget to wear your gloves!”