Okehampton College is benefiting from energy savings of as much as £25,000 a year following the installation of a 199kW Hargassner wood pellet boiler from leading biomass specialists Wood Energy Ltd.
The school, which is situated in the centre of Okehampton in the Northwest corner of Dartmoor National Park, has a long standing campaign to promote environmentally friendly and efficient sources of energy. As part of this commitment they wanted to install a high energy efficiency, clean burn wood pellet boiler adjacent to its main school boiler house to supplement the current gas burning boilers.
After consulting with EDF Energy, the school was introduced to Wood Energy Ltd and it was decided that a 199kW Hargassner wood pellet boiler would be the ideal choice as the boiler is 95% efficient and carbon-neutral, saving the college £25,000 a year on heating bills.
The boiler is housed in a unit which was fabricated on site and integrated to the existing heating system via a single flow and return connection by Simon Hayes of Aston Cord, offering a fully containerised solution for the biomass heating boiler and fuel.
Keith Webber, Community Energy manager said “A lot of small schools use oil or electricity to heat their schools. So if we can save a great deal and we used gas which is cheaper than oil and electricity, the potential savings in those other schools is even greater.”
“We are very pleased with Wood Energy Ltd and the Hargassner boiler and we plan to use the money saved from the new boiler for ongoing works around the school including further energy efficiency improvements.”
Forward thinking Okehampton College has just been graded as 'Outstanding' by Ofsted, and over the last few years has made a concerted effort to reduce its energy bills from £100,000 annually to almost zero – the result of smarter energy management, energy efficiency improvements and the installation or renewable energy.
Wood Energy is the UK’s exclusive distributor for wood chip and pellet boilers from leading Austrian manufacturers, Binder and Hargassner. It supplies chip, pellet and log boiler systems ranging in size from 9kW to 10MW. The company’s team of in-house designers can advise on boiler applications up to 10MW; and skilled commissioning engineers have successfully installed over 100,000kW of renewable heating across more than 400 projects to date - with an after-sales service that ensures both optimum performance throughout the lifetime of a boiler and a guaranteed provision for the non-domestic Renewable Heat Incentive.
For more information:
Wood Energy
T: 0845 070 7338