ATS a "perfect model" for biomass
Associated Timber Services (ATS) in Grantham hasn’t looked back since commissioning its biomass boiler 18 months ago.

The home-grown hardwood sawmiller decided to make the move to address its rising amount of wood waste, and rising fuel bills for its existing oil-fired kilns.

"During 2008 no-one in the market was giving me anywhere near what I thought my woodwaste was worth so I kept building it up to about 2-3,000 tonnes," said managing director Andy Lodowski.

At the same time ATS was operating oil-fired kilns, and watching its annual oil bill climb to around £330,000.

"It meant the business of kilning was impossible; it wasn’t cost-effective," said Mr Lodowski.

The Carbon Trust put ATS in contact with consultants Sustainable Energy Ltd, who found the company was a "perfect model" for biomass technology.

The result was a £1.5m investment in a Fröling Lambdamat 750kW boiler, a new boiler room and new kilns – and ATS took advantage of the development to treble monthly kiln capacity from 300m3 to 900m3.

The investment was funded by ATS’s bank – which was pleased to lend money to a green project – and a £100,000 loan from the Carbon Trust.

It was a large capital cost, said Mr Lodowski, but, with the Renewable Heat Incentive returning £70-90,000 a year and the £330,000 oil bill consigned to history, ATS is well on its way to meeting the five to seven-year payback period. In addition, the company is making a CO2 saving of around 900 tonnes a year.

"There are multiple benefits," said Mr Lodowski. "It’s a no-brainer."

Wood Waste Fuels Clifford Jones Expansion
When Clifford Jones recently installed three new kilns at its mill in Ruthin, north Wales, the company’s natural choice of fuel was biomass.

Since 2005, Clifford Jones has been using its own wood waste to make briquettes, sold under the Blazers Fuels brand, and in 2009 it added pellets to its product portfolio. It also produces bark for landscaping and, in the past, supplied some co-products to panel manufacturers.

However, now the company is making full use of its 900 tonnes of weekly wood waste on site by using a biomass boiler to heat the new kilns, which comprise two 200m3 boxes and a 60m3 facility to dry Clifford Jones’s new laminated product.

A new Indusvent dust extraction unit also collects the dust from the workshop, the new moulder and the mill for use in the pellets.

"Now we have no timber waste at all," said managing director Keith Corbett.

The 980kW Ranheat boiler will also heat the factory and qualifies Clifford Jones for the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).

It’s a sophisticated combustion system which can cope with virtually any type of wood or moisture content. An inclined step grate in the boiler means wet material can be moved through the combustion zone so it’s dried before it’s burned.

The system is also highly automated, with automatic tube cleaning and de-ashing and the 40m3 bunker provides enough fuel for the boiler to run for around three days without intervention.

Clifford Jones is just one of many timber companies that Ranheat has supplied in its nearly 30 years in business.

"The RHI makes so much sense, it’s such a huge source of income. Timber companies are crazy not to do it," said Ranheat managing director and owner Chris Franklin.

It’s particularly well suited to pallet manufacturers, who use a lot of energy heat-treating their products, he said.

Mr Franklin is quick to point out that biomass only makes sense if the wood used has reached the end of its useful life.

"One of the important things with the RHI is that we shouldn’t be chopping down trees to turn them into fuel," he said. "We should be using the residue which is of no use. The majority of our work is with timber that’s already had its useful function."

Biomass Keeps Rowlinson Warm
Since installing its biomass heating system and briquette maker late last year, Rowlinson Garden Products has done away with wood skips on its site – and potentially hefty heating and wood waste disposal bills.

"We wanted to reduce the cost of removing waste and use it to heat the factory. It seems crazy that we had the fuel, we just needed the heaters," said commercial and operations director Charles Firth.

After considering various options, Rowlinson decided on a solution from Fercell/Weima UK, which designed, manufactured and installed ducting, a shredder, briquette press, worm screw conveyor, automatic carousel bagging system and three warm air heaters.

"Fercell were very competitive with a very good standard of machine," said Mr Firth.

Fercell’s package included a Weima C-150 briquette press which produces briquettes of 50mm diameter and has an hourly throughput of 30-50kg; a Fercell Ultra 60-24SF/18kW single shaft wood shredder; a 10-bag carousel bagging unit; three Fercell 600 boilers; and Fercell Kwik-Fix ducting. The boilers – two supplying heat to the company’s 36,000ft2 factory and one in the 48,000ft2 warehouse – replaced oilfired heating and have been particularly successful.

"The factory’s warmer than it’s ever been," said Mr Firth.

Heating a draughty warehouse may seem like an extravagance but using biomass fuel makes it viable. "It takes the chill off the area where people work but it’s a working warehouse with loading bays so you wouldn’t consider heating it if you had to pay for fuel," sad Mr Firth.

The system has a summer burn duct which allows the heat from burning waste in the warmer months to be exhausted outside.

The old oil-fired heaters were fed from tanks that the fork lift trucks also draw from so while it is difficult to quantify the cost savings made, Mr Firth said the impact on oil consumption is significant. "Rather than ordering oil every few weeks, it’s now every few months," he said. "The nice thing is we’re using our waste to provide heat and we’re not paying someone else to take it away, as well as making a saving on more efficient heating."

The boilers burn ‘dirty’ waste like old timber packing strips, while the clean, dry, offcut waste from the manufacturing plant goes to the briquette press.

"We realised the clean timber was something we could recycle into a commodity that could be sold," said Mr Firth. "The briquetter is located in the machine shop so we’re not having to take the waste very far. We fill it up and it more or less runs itself."

At present the briquettes, which are bagged into 10kg units, are sold through Rowlinson’s factory shop but the company is looking for a small chain distributor that will take them by the pallet load.

Briquette machines, said Fercell marketing and communications manager Bruce Le Gros, put biomass within reach for many smaller companies. "Making pellets is expensive but a briquette machine can cost under £10,000," he said.

Briquettes also have the advantage of being able to be stored and they have a similar calorific value to brown coal.

"A lot of small joinery companies are shovelling shavings on a fire but that’s like putting flour with butter – it doesn’t mix forever. Shavings can almost put the fire out, you can’t store them, and as they take on moisture, complete combustion can no longer be assured," said Mr Le Gros.

Fercell will soon be offering a new range of high density briquette presses that can produce briquettes from MDF, overcoming the problem of the material not binding.

Wood Waste Technology helps client get into hot water
When cabinet manufacturer Getley UK upgraded its 20,000ft2 production centre to accommodate additional machinery and extra office space in Stafford, it was the ideal opportunity to install biomass technology for heating and hot water.

The system, supplied and installed by Wood Waste Technology, has enabled Getley to save on waste disposal costs and reduce manual handling of waste.

The company is also benefiting from the Renewable Heat Incentive, whereby the government pays businesses for producing their own heat through green technology.

Wood offcuts are fed into a Gross shredder and the shredded waste is then air transported to a 20m3 silo which automatically feeds the boiler when required.

The boiler, manufactured in the UK by Wood Waste Technology, can burn any type of chipped or shredded wood waste, including the tonnes of sawdust generated by production. Previously Getley had to manually bag up the sawdust and pay to dispose of it, but now the new dust extraction system feeds into the same silo as the shredded material.

The warm air is distributed across the factory floor by strategically placed air handling units, which can be redirected to create the most comfortable temperature. The warmer environment is also more favourable to working with chipboard and the edgebander so it is also helping to further improve output quality. Production manager, David Hickman said the investment in the boiler had made a difference in many ways – not just in heating the factory, but in freeing up resources, saving time and helping maintain a tidier workplace.

"We create around 10-12 tonnes of wood waste each week, and this is rising all the time as the capacity of our production increases with new machinery, so removing all the wood waste and sawdust was becoming more and more time consuming," he said.

"We like how the touchscreen PLC interface makes the boiler easy to use, and it’s a bonus that we have control over the boiler capacity, allowing it to be turned down when the factory is empty. This makes better use of our resources and maximises our Renewable Heat Incentive payments."

Wood Waste Technology managing director Kurt Cockroft said its new boiler system would open up the market to allow smaller companies, as well as larger corporations, to benefit from renewable energy hot water solutions.

The boilers offer three heating solutions in one package, providing space heating to factory areas, radiator heating for offices, and hot water.

They can run from 30% up to full capacity and are available in outputs from 300kW to 1MW.