Northampton-based Ranheat Engineering is well known in the woodworking industry for its range of industrial wood-fired biomass boilers and heaters.
The efficient burning of wood residues from companies within the woodworking industry including the burning of chipboard, MFC and MDF including fine dusts as produced by modern CNC machining centres. Companies make savings on heating costs, disposal costs and for the last 10 years the Renewable Heat Incentive has also supplied an income stream.
Ranheats’ core market is the woodworking industry so they were a little surprised when contacted by Serco Leisure.
Ranheat were then approached by a firm of energy consultants to produce a scheme to heat the National Sports Centre at Lilleshall Hall. This involved the construction of an energy centre containing two boilers of 340kW and 725kW to cope with the varying heat demand of the nation’s premier sports complex. The site is run by Serco Leisure on behalf of Sport England.
Originally the site was heated by oil (and prior to that hand fired coal boilers) Sport England wanted to go with a biomass system using wood chip from local suppliers delivered to site.
Parts of the site are listed and many of the trees are protected due to their age and historic significance. The complex is a mix of listed and modern buildings including a gymnasium, sports halls, residential accommodation, administration and management.
The energy centre was to be connected to a range of existing boiler rooms, mainly in basements this would involve over 1/2 km of pre-insulated underground pipework carefully routed to avoid the roots of the historic trees in the grounds.
Wood chips were to be delivered by articulated lorry with a moving floor discharge onto the floor of the woodchip store. The store was to hold 200m³ of woodchip.
Both boilers are fitted with ceramic flue gas filters and can run independently or together. As part of the contract a minimum efficiency was stipulated. This had to be verified by an independent consultant. The consultants chose Ranheat as the scheme put forward could use a wide range of wood based material and did not need to run with expensive wood pellets.
How the woodchip was delivered was an important consideration as was noise during delivery and noise during operation of the system. At no time could the centre be closed as it is in use 24-7 and there was to be no disruption to the athlete’s training schedule.
Equally surprising to Ranheat was when they received an invitation to tender from a contractor for a Ranheat system and the use of a Ranheat Boiler had been specified by the Ministry of Justice for inclusion into a scheme for Channings Wood Prison in the west country.
All Ranheat boilers and heaters can run on all types of wood and wood-based products.
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www.ranheat.com
