When Rob Gardiner wants to heat Damariscotta Hardware, he doesn’t have to call the dealer to order several hundred of gallons of fuel oil anymore.
Instead, he walks to the rear of his store, opens up the furnace door, and throws a few logs on the fire.
The primary heating system for the Damariscotta store is a wood boiler heating water that runs through coils in the floor.
Gardiner, the store owner and manager, says the new system, in place for the last six weeks, works well. Best of all, he says it will save money, pay for itself in three to five years, is non polluting and uses wood from local sources.
A special feature of the system is a computer-controlled system that measures the outside air and helps regulate the water temperature.
The heart of the unit is a unit called a wood fired gasification boiler.
“Wood is burned inside a firebox lodged inside a container holding 2,000 gallons of water,” said Chris Holley, the New England representative for Garn wood heating systems.
To start the unit, Gardiner loads a wheelbarrow full of wood, including soft wood, and scrap lumber into the sealed firebox. A blower pushes air into the firebox where the heated air is channeled into a secondary combustion chamber where the smoke, creosote and other particulates are incinerated. The gasses then move through a heat exchanger where they are cooled and pushed out the exhaust pipe.
The result is a chimney that sends a fine misty discharge into the air, instead of a heavy wood smoke.
The wood burns so cleanly that there are only a few shovels full of ash to remove.
To prove a point, Gardiner pulled the lid from a tin ash can and pointed to a small amount of fine ash covering the bottom quarter of the container.
“That is about a week’s worth of ashes,” he said.
That is one of the big selling points for the unit.
“It is clean burning and burns fuel from around here,” Gardiner said.
Most wood stove makers recommend hard wood because soft wood, like, pine, emit creosote which accumulates in the chimney. Creosote burns, as anyone who has ever had a chimney fire can attest, but “this unit burns it up so we can burn soft wood,” said Gardiner.
“We can burn logs, pellets, pressed bricks and even corn cobs,” he said.
With logs, he has to fill the unit two times a day and expects to use additional fuel in colder weather.
Gardiner said the cost of the unit needed to heat an 18,000 square foot store was between $20-30,000.
The unit was installed by Jon Poland in Bristol. There are two other similar units in the Midcoast. One is at Brooks Trap Mill in Thomaston and the other in a private residence in Bristol, Poland said.
Gardiner said the real reason he installed the unit was to save money.
“When you figure the cost of fuel oil, the payback could be three to five years. If oil goes up to $5 a gallon, the payback will be quicker,” he said.
Now that the wood boiler project seems to be ontrack, what is the next project for Gardiner?
“I would like to install some sort of windmill to generate electricity,” he said. However, he admits that is something for another day.
Already his wood boiler unit is paying dividends. “I got a call from the fuel oil supplier and they wanted to know if something was wrong. They said I only burned 20 gallons of fuel oil last week,” he said. “I just laughed.”
