Pellet problems and a faulty motherboard on one of the boilers, says Village of Burns Lake development services coordinator, Jeff Ragsdale, were some of the difficulties they had to overcome while switching over the heating system at the Tom Forsyth Arena to bio-fuel.
"Our heating system augers the pellets into a vacuum tube, which transfers them to the hopper on the top of the boiler, and finally another auger conveys them into the burn pot. This process appears to have been too detrimental to the industrial grade Tahtsa pellets, which where breaking apart and plugging up the system," he explained. "We switched to Pinnacle Pellets and have had better success."
"There was also a faulty motherboard on one of the boilers that was causing problems with programing," said Ragsdale, "Once that was diagnosed and replaced (still on warranty) the system performed much better."
The $418,880 contract for converting the Tom Forsyth Arena system to bio-fuel was awarded to Fireside Mechanical of Quesnel, B.C.
There system consists of three Froling P4 60 kw. boilers that are connected in a cascade design (in series) in the container immediately adjacent to the ice plant. The other container holds the pellet fuel. The boilers heat glycol treated water in a closed loop system and stores it in three storage tanks inside the arena. The system also captures waste heat from the ice plant, and there’s also natural gas backup boiler for redundancy. From the storage tanks the heated water is pumped around to various locations and diffused via a series of radiators, or converted via heat exchanger for domestic hot water purposes. The boilers can be monitored and controlled remotely by computer software.
All together the high tech heating solution promises to be a very efficient system. They will be able to form a more complete picture of operations, when they get some data back from the software monitoring system.
"We are in the process of loading our pellet fuel consumption data into our Green House Gas monitoring software, but we have not had time to analyze the financial performance of the system yet."
Ragsdale says the system will be in operation this winter.