Pennsylvania Floral Industry News
Dillon Floral Greenhouse Heating Conversion from Oil to Wood
Our Strategic Objective:
To install a wood chip heating system to significantly reduce our heating expense, eliminate our dependence on oil, and substantially reduce our heating system air pollutant emissions.
Project Benefits:
- Retention of 28 jobs
- Retention of our primary competitive advantage—having super-fresh, home grown cut flowers for our customers.
- Annual Reduction of stack emissions is 23 tons of sulfur oxides, 2 tons of nitrous oxides and 1,870 tons of Carbon Dioxide
We are a fourth-generation, family owned greenhouse flower grower and wholesale Florist, serving the retail floral trade since 1875. We have three wholesale distribution centers in Pennsylvania: Bloomsburg, Scranton and Allentown. Our mission is to provide hassle-free floral products and services of consistently superior quality to professional florists in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Learn more about Dillon Floral at www.dillonfloral.com. Contact information: Dillon Floral Corporation, 933 Columbia Blvd., Bloomsburg, PA 17815. Robert W. Dillon, President, rwd@dillonfloral.com., 570-784-5770, ext. 170., Fax: 570-387-8135
Previous Heating System:
We utilized two oil burning, high-pressure steam boilers. The burners consumed approximately 140,000 gallons of #6 oil per year. The heating season starts in late September and continues through early May. At today’s oil price of $1.80/gallon, the old system would cost approximately $252,000 for this year’s heating season.
New Heating System:
The system has three components: The wood storage structure, the wood handling system, and the burner / boiler. The total project cost was $1,000,000.
- Wood Storage Structure - The wood is received and stored in a covered, membrane-structure with a cement floor to keep the wood dry and allow for easy loading/handling.
- Wood Handling System – This is the equipment used to move and process the wood chips. Included are a loader to move and load the wood chips, a screener to filter out chips that are too large and a live auger bottom storage bunker, which stores the screened chips and feeds them automatically into the burner.
- Burner / Boiler– The 6 Million BTU Challengerâ burner, manufactured by Advanced Recycling, St. Mary’s, PA, cleanly combusts the wood at a temperatures ranging from 1,000-1,800 degrees F. The boiler turns the heat into steam at up to 110 psi, which is used to heat the greenhouses. An auto de-ash system automatically removes the ash from the burner. A condenser turns excess steam back into water, when the sun is heating the greenhouses. The new system is backed-up by our existing #1 boiler using natural gas as its fuel.
Wood Fuel:
The new system will require an estimated 2,500 tons of wood chips per year. This is the equivalent of approximately 110 tractor-trailer loads per year. Wood chips are widely available from the logging industry in Northeastern and Northcentral Pennsylvania costing between $22 and $32 per ton. Annual fuel costs are estimated to be $70,000. An unknown quantity of free wood chips may also be available from right-of-way tree clearing companies doing work in the area.
Capital Investment Payback Period:
The annual saving is dependent on the cost of #6 oil and the cost of wood chips each year during the payback period. Our payback period is estimated to be approximately 5 years.
Project Funding:
The project was funded in part by a $206,000 DEP Energy Harvest Grant. Low interest financing was provided by the Pollution Prevention Assistance Account from the PA DEP and the Machinery & Equipment Loan Fund from the PA DCEC. The remainder was financed through a commercial loan from First Columbia Bank and Trust Company.
