You get dirty working on a farm and the laundry facilities around here are Wash and Wire in Shelburne Falls. I struck up a conversation with Jessica M., the owner of the facility, and quickly learned that propane charges were eating her alive – unto the point she might have to close the doors.
We at the Stranded Wind Initiative usually work on industrial scale stuff, but this is the laundry facility for the town and it’s where farmerchuck and farmerterri come to do their laundry, too, as well as being a local business which we very much want to protect and preserve. I also wanted to learn more about what Chuck does with boilers and so forth, so I called him in to look the problem over.
The facility has ten pairs of vertically stacker dryers and nineteen washing machines, a mix of heavy duty front loaders and consumer style top loaders.
We got in behind the dryers and inspected the situation. Chuck saw a forty percent duty cycle on the dryer flame and a great deal of orange: fully half of the $2,000 a month propane bill is going out the exhaust unburned due to old fashion, inefficient dryer design.
The heat from the dryers is totally vented to the outside and the room itself is heated by an old fashion Modine overhead unit – also very inefficient.
The laundry shares the building with Christopher’s Grinders, owned by newlyweds Christoper and Alfie. They use no heating in their space due to ovens, they’ve insulated the customer area so it all stays warm, and there is a high efficiency Boderus boiler in place – the one bright spot in the energy usage here.
Chuck roamed around, peering at the plates on the back of machines, asking questions, and scratching out a few simple diagrams on his notepad. We went back to the house and the process continued; sketching, erasing, mumbling, and occasionally getting up to go look at things on the computer.
After much consideration there was very happy news; the $2,000/month propane bill should become not more than $500/month if they used the waste vegetable oil from the restaurant for heating. The propane powered dryers would be interfaced to a pair of heat exchangers that would provide air at the right temperature and the source would be a boiler powered by the vegetable oil.
Our next step is figuring out how to get a grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to fund the $30,000 project. Once this is done the details will be released to the industry via an article in the Coin Laundry Association’s monthly journal so all may benefit from this effort.
Farmerchuck is in western Massachusetts and it would be a huge help if someone could point us to an old coin op dual dryer stack in the area. The burner can be shot – he says he needs one to hook up to his existing boiler to fine tune his plan.
We think this woman has lost quite enough to big oil with the death of her husband in the 9/11 attack. Banding together to find and fund a solution for her that'll keep the doors open on the way to redrawing the landscape for coin laundry operators is the least we could do ...