I had a nice talk with the 9/11 widow the other day, she happened to be going out of town, and was in need of someone to entertain the livestock while she was gone. Lately I’ve been reading Ran Prieur and I jumped at the chance to imitate his house sitting lifestyle, even if only for a day.
I did a bit more than sit; farmerchuck has been teaching me a bit about boilers and such, so I did the investigatory work required to determine what should be done with the heating plant for this house.
Here are my charges, first Sushi, then Freddy. They fight. She warned me to not get between them so I’ve been treating them like sheep, mimicking Sydney’s deep "I will be biting you shortly" bark, which has worked for the two fisticuffs they’ve had so far.
The house itself was likely built around the turn of the last century, or at least I find it so based on the construction and fixtures. The place has been expanded and refurbished with the intent that it’ll be a bed and breakfast one day soon. This attached bit at the rear is actually a barn – maybe this is more a civil war era house? I’ll have to ask later ...
The insides are gorgeously done – I don’t think my little camera and lack of tripod comes anywhere near doing the place justice. The whole house is tidy, spacious, and quite relaxing. The floors everywhere but the front room (parlor?) are variable width hardwood – I think it’s all chestnut.
This is all well and good, but I was really interested in the heating system. I found a manky ol’ boiler that is probably old enough to be my mother ... 40% efficient? 50%? Chuck will know ...
The whole thing produces hot water and it goes into this distribution network. There are three cartridge pumps (red & green things in the first photo) that move the hot water around and the green box is the controller. There is a similar setup around the corner to the left, all fed by the same hot water pipe. There are mixers with adjustable knobs for each pump and they’re apparently manually tuned individually – kitchen gets 140 degree water, bathroom gets 120, per a hand written sign tacked to the wall. There are half a dozen temperature gauges here and there in the system, presumably for tuning, and all were near room temperature – I’d just got up and not done anything involving water, taking these pictures first.
The heat in the house is all radiant – ancient steam style radiators and a few of the new, space saving wall mount style.
There are a few things you have to know to calculate how much heat you have to put into a house to maintain it at -20F, the base temperature used in Massachusetts for heating systems. I don’t know all of them but windows, doors, and such or fenestration, is a key component. I walked around with my note book, checking out the four bedrooms, the two studio spaces upstairs, the kitchen, other common areas, and I found a total of thirty one typical house sized windows, half a dozen doors including a set of French style double doors, and a sprinkling of smaller ones. I suspect the insulation value of single vs. double paned is an issue and an experienced eye can gauge R factor just by looking, but I’m not there yet.
I hope I’ve gathered enough information on the heating system and loss sources that we can determine a new configuration for this place. I’m told the bill ran to $3,000 last year and it might be $4,500 this year the way prices are going. If that boiler is truly a 45% unit and we get her Laundromat converted to a waste vegetable oil system then she’ll have a left over 90% efficient Boderus (boo-DAIRus) boiler unit that could be moved here – the heat bill would be 50% of the estimated $4,500 or $2,250.
So, this is one house owned by a person who has a bit of money and there are options, but what can be done on a community wide scale? Farmerchuck has a simple, elegant solution:
A city of this size will use about 3.0 megawatts at peak in the summer ... exactly the maximum sensible size for a wood gas based generation system. Oh, and said system will kick out enough hot water to heat five to eight hundred homes – the perfect size for Shelburne Falls, population 1,991 in the last census. There would be some job creation in that people need to cut wood and mind the plant, and there would be a burst of construction. There is a serious concern with wood fired systems’ particulate emissions, but the gasifier gets around that – runs cleaner than anything else going.
The motivation for this is pretty simple – five hundred houses times five gallons a day six months of the year times five dollars a gallon - $2.25 million in fuel savings for the six months heating season. The power production plant itself costs $3.5 million but that’ll be recovered just on the electricity generated. I don’t have a good sense of what it costs to trench to five hundred homes but for argument’s sake lets say its two years worth of heating cost or $9,000/home.
Would you take a deal like this if it was offered to your city? I’d want it partially locally owned and locally run – freeze (pun intended) heating costs at 2007 levels and as peak oil rolls onward, driving prices ever higher, the competitive advantage for the town becomes obvious. Places with heat, lights, and stability will draw in businesses that can not be retained by high energy cost, unstable communities.
OK, we can leave off that last paragraph so as to not frighten those who aren’t peak oil aware and this plan still makes sense. Do you think anyone will bite, either on the policy or the investment front?