Case Study A radiant residence Seniors at Les Residences Jodin keeping warm with biomass By Andrew Snook Seniors living at Les Residences Jodin nursing home are keeping warm this winter thanks largely in part to the installation of two hot water biomass boilers. The nursing home, which was recently built for residents in the Edmundston, N.B. area is equipped with 186 beds and was constructed at a cost of approximately $48.5 million. Residents were moved into the facility this past summer. The entire facil-ity is heated using a radiant heating system equipped with two Viessmann biomass boilers that produce upwards of 1.8 million BTUs of heat. To complement the biomass boilers, which generate the primary heat for the facility, two 4-million BTU Viessmann oil-fired boilers were also installed to make sure the heaviest heating demands for the facility are met in the wintertime. “For most of the year they won’t burn any oil,” says Daron Thomas of Thomas Industrial Sales, the company that supplied the biomass heating system. “From a combustion efficiency point of view, they run at about 87 per cent efficiency.” Wood pellets for the biomass boilers are delivered by Saint-Quentin, N.B.-based Groupe Savoie every three weeks to the nursing home’s on-site 60-ton pellet silo that fuels the boil-ers. The pellets are fed to the boilers via two wood pellet augers. “It’s fully automatic,” Thomas explains. “Once the system de-cides to turn on, it feeds itself, runs the augers, measures the combustion efficiency and gets rid of it’s own ash. Once the pel-lets get burned, sensors activate to communicate that the pellets have burned and run another auger that drives the ash up to an ash can.” Two Viessmann biomass boilers were installed to produce the primary heat for the radiant heating system at Les Residences Jodin, a nursing home in Edmundston, N.B. Canadian BIOMASS 23
Canadian Biomass January February 2016: Page 23
