Written by Frank Peebles
Citizen staff
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Friday, 06 November 2009 |
This graphic shows a heating system similar to the one which will be used at the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community. (Submitted graphic)
This one-of-a- kind heating system makes the entire village independent for all heating needs. They don't have to pay the high costs of burning fossil fuels or cranking up the electricity registers, they don't have to contribute the pollution of these other heat sources, and the whole place is toasty warm.
"It is actually operating better than we anticipated," said Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community board member Tom Sentes. "We had engineering estimates and we had computer models to give us a sense of how this system would work, but it has never really been tried anywhere before, so we didn't know what it would do in reality. We've found that it is actually more efficient than we anticipated."
"It is phenomenal," agreed BHTC program manager Marshall Smith. "We are very happy with what we're seeing. This system is going to put us on a different plane from what we were experiencing the last two winters, and we are proud to be a showcase for this made-in-Prince-George technology."
The 400-acre campus is located at the remote end of Blackwater Road, at the end of the pavement where the public driveway turns into a gravel resource road into nothing but forest. The area is an active logging zone stretching from the back country of Quesnel to the back country of Vanderhoof. Baldy Hughes is the only populated spot thereabouts.
The waste wood from the many logging blocks back there are what BHTC hopes to tap into to feed their energy system when the second phase comes online, which is an electricity co-generation plant that will allow them to truly leave the energy grid completely and focus their money on addictions programs, not utility costs.
Sentes and Smith said the heating bill alone for the recovery village was more than $20,000 per month at times, last year.
The first year's pellets for the heating component were donated by Pacific Bioenergy Corp.
As reported in a two-part feature series by The Citizen earlier this fall, the heating and electricity systems were developed by DelTech Manufacturing Inc., a Prince George company.
"Eight buildings are being heated, but because of the mild weather it is only running at about 10 per cent. That is all we need at the moment," said Brian Fehr, co-owner of DelTech and an active supporter of BHTC. "We send heated water to eight buildings, currently, and it circulates back only two degrees less than the temperature it was when it left the boilers. Now, when it reaches minus 40 it will drop down a lot more, but we were anticipating we would have a loss of five or six degrees in that circulation process at this point, so to only be losing that amount is big news for us."
Fehr said the benefit of that higher water temperature is the boilers don't have to burn as hot, thus cutting down on the amount of pellets feeding the fire.
The piping they used was very well insulated and that is the reason for the high energy retention in the circulating water, Fehr explained.
fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
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Last Updated ( Friday, 06 November 2009 )
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