Member Article

Sweet success as boiler installation helps cut costs

A UK honey producer has slashed its energy bills by a massive £23,000 a year after completing a renewable heating and engineering project aimed at cutting manufacturing costs.

Tropical Forest Products, of Aberystwyth, has scooped a national environmental business award for the project which included commissioning a wood pellet boiler heating system from Organic Energy.

Welshpool-based Organic Energy worked with Tropical Forest, which produces a variety of products sourced directly from small scale bee-keepers across the UK, EU and Africa, to develop a bespoke heat and hot water system.

Managing director of Organic Energy, the UK’s sole distributor of European leading biomass boiler brand ÖkoFEN, Andy Boroughs, said: “The company wanted to replace an inefficient LPG boiler with a renewable energy system which would cut fuel costs and achieve a reduction in carbon emissions.

“We supplied an ÖkoFEN Pellematic PES 56kW wood pellet boiler as well as a 1,500 litre buffer tank, with modular temperature controlled pump sets, heating seven zones to met the specific brief of controlling various temperatures for a number of processes involved in the production of honey products.”

Luke Wainwright, of Aberystwyth-based Tropical Forest, said: “This project has been a very complicated one and has involved creating new systems to use the energy from the boiler efficiently.

“The reductions in energy use per kilo mostly come from the new systems we have engineered and the level of after sales support has been fantastic, Organic Energy really lived up to their promise on that one

“We pushed the boundary of what is possible with an ÖkoFEN boiler here at our honey factory. It has been a difficult journey matching the capabilities of the boiler to our specific technical needs but Organic Energy have been with us every step of the way. Our system is now fully operational and our business is reaping the benefits both financially and in terms of productivity, let alone the 80% reduction in CO2 emissions.”

The installation, carried out by Menai Heating, displaced 100% of the site’s annual LPG and electricity consumption for heating. Under the Government’s Renewable Heat Incentive the plant will be entitled to a payment of between £5,000 to £6,100 per annum with a 1.7 year return on investment.

The annual savings for the plant now stand at £23,359 with a 63.6 tonne saving in annual CO2. The business is now using 50% less energy per kilogram of honey produced, thanks to new systems engineered at the factory, including the introduction of the biomass boiler.

The project won an Institute of Welsh Affairs Business Awards Environmental Award for the project.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Organic Energy .