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Going with the Grain

Gordon Traill bears more than a passing resemblance to David Cameron and just like the Tory leader he has a green message to spread. His company Treco Ltd sells and installs Italian produced grain boilers and he is convinced that this technology takes the hassle out of biomass energy. He says “everyone seems to make biomass complicated and it isn’t. What people want is a reasonably priced machine that can burn a cheap, readily available and easily storable fuel. What could be simpler than that?”

Mr Traill looked all over Europe to find such a machine and found his road to Damascus was actually the road to Cammarata in Sicily, the home of grain burner manufacturers Tatano. Their Kalorina boiler range had a happy medium incorporating good heavy engineering and the ability to burn virtually anything. The smallest boilers in the range weigh more than 300 kg so the build quality is superb. All paintwork is powder coated and oven baked, giving a finish you would be proud of on your car.

The boiler can be run on cereal grains especially wheat, crushed rape, wood pellets and nut shells. Traill’s business partner James Trebble told me that they have tested many different fuels and so far, wheat has performed most consistently. He said “we thought we’d found the holy grail when we tried burning soya hulls but unfortunately it caused a lot of smoke and made our yard look like a kipper factory!”

The boiler can’t be lit with grain and so needs a small quantity of wood pellets to get it started. Ultimately their aim is to create what they call an uberfuel, a blend of whole crop wheat with other low quality feed grains to form an affordable, highly efficient, clean burn pellet that can be ignited as easily as a wood pellet.

Traill recognizes that their biggest hurdle will be to get other farmers to burn a food crop. He says that he has talked to a number of farmers who think that burning grain is obscene but hopes that they will be won round when they look at the economics of the system and the savings that can be made when compared to oil and LPG heating systems.

The main competitors to grain boilers in terms of potential savings are wood chip or pellet boilers. Traill feels that both have their place with the former being extremely cost effective in large installations. However, he makes the point that issues with the fuel supply chain, the need for a large space for storage of bulky wood chips and the “industrial” feel of the units can put people off.

Pellet boilers like grain boilers are much more suitable for the domestic market and could be easily accommodated by anyone with a reasonably sized house in the country. However, Traill pointed out that the current price of wood pellets (about £150/tonne) is higher than the best livestock feed that you can buy and too high to adequately stimulate this market. Gradually more and more pellet producers are coming on stream and prices will come down but it will be several years until the pellet and wheat price meet.

If there is a downside to grain boilers it is the fact that they produce up to 10 times as much ash as wood pellets and also produce clinker, a glass like deposit. The unit needs to be de-ashed weekly and the boiler pipes checked and cleaned every 2 to 3 weeks but this is not particularly onerous. The Rural Energy Trust, another company supplying grain boilers, based in Nottinghamshire, have recently received funding from the Home Grown Cereals Authority to investigate the amount of ash, clinker and emissions produced from different cereals.

Many biomass sceptics worry about what might happen if your boiler broke down in the winter. Trebble explained that it is a simple operation to fit a small emergency oil/LPG tank for £300 as part of the installation and explained that one would simply have to press a button for three seconds for it to kick in. They aim to get an engineer to customers within 3 days. In case of a power cut, they also offer emergency power kits so that the boiler will continue working and keeping you warm until the power comes back on.

Traill runs a 350 acre farm including 100 acres of maize, 50 acres of wheat, 150 head of cattle and 100 beef. In partnership with Trebble, he also runs a car leasing business. He says like any farmer with a relatively small holding he is used to running a tight ship and intends to use this experience as well as an honest, no nonsense approach to enable Treco to offer other farmers a highly competitive heating solution that is a real alternative.

Business case
A 5-6 bed farmhouse with a heating bill of £2500 would make significant savings by converting to a grain boiler. Based on current prices, such a system requiring approximately 18 tonnes of grain per annum, would pay back the extra cost of installation in less than 2 years compared to a new oil or LPG system. Grain boilers are less competitive against mains gas with a payback of over 7 years. Grain can be stored in a 600 gallon oil facility which would be able to accommodate 2.5 tonnes of grain and would require seven deliveries per year. The boilers are guaranteed for 2 years, but as the construction is very robust the life expectancy is more likely to be 15 to 20 years.

The cost illustration is based on the continuation of previous grant levels of £1500 per installation. However, this is subject to the detail of the Governments recently announced £78.5 million Low Carbon Buildings Programme and their formal response to the Biomass Task Force call for 40% capital grants for biomass boilers, expected later this month.

The installation of a larger boiler would be suitable for commercial applications such as heating farm offices and cottages, light industrial complexes and glasshouses. In these cases the heat could be sold to the end user via a heat meter. The tenant would pay the same price as if they were being heated by oil, whilst the heat entrepreneur would be selling heat at a value equivalent to about £140 per tonne for his wheat crop. As Gordon Traill says “that would put a smile on many farmers faces”.

Funding:
Low Carbon Building Programme administered by the Energy Saving Trust
www.est.org.uk/housingbuildings/funding/lowcarbonbuildings/

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