Educational Portfolio
Mullingar CBS
TES was chosen by the Department of Education to supply and install two wood pellet boilers for Scoil Mhuire Na mBraithe CBS Mullingar County Westmeath. This school had an existing oil boiler rated at 300kw.
The TES design team selected two KWB 100KW Multifire Boilers as the chosen boilers for the project. A 1,500 litre fully insulated buffer vessel was chosen to provide thermal storage and to allow efficient balancing of the heat load. This proposal was agreed with Mr. John Dolan of the Department of Education and also Mr. Jerry Geaney the mechanical consultant on the project.
The two boiler option was chosen on the basis that both boilers operating at full rated capacity would cope with the maximum heat demand on the school at any time. However having two boilers allowed the school to be able to turn down to a minimum of 30kw capacity at any time and also to increase the life span of the boilers by rotating the lead boiler for each heating season.
The boilers were delivered to site in the summer/autumn of 2007 and were assembled and put into position by fully trained TES technicians. The pipework connecting the boiler to the client system was then completed by Ennellbrook Engineering the appointed Mechanical contractors.
In September 2007 the building required heat and TES returned to site to commission the boiler.
TES also installed a full visualisation system which allows the school to monitor the performance and output of the boilers in real time on an installed computer. This facility is also available to the Department of Education on a remote viewing basis.
Mr. Fergus Oakes, Headmaster of the school states that “I was delighted with the project provided by TES. In the school the boiler needed replacing and our efforts combined with those of John Dolan convinced the Department to use our school as a test location for wood pellet heating. My concern is always that there is adequate heat in the school and with the ever increasing price of oil this was becoming more and more of a budgetary difficulty. This new system has decreased our running costs by over 50% and the level of comfort in the school has remained at the same level. TES provided a tremendous service from supply to commissioning of the boilers and are always at the end of the phone should I have any query”
Mr. John Raleigh of Ennellbrook Engineering stated that “TES did exactly what they said they would do. They supplied, assembled and commissioned the wood pellet on time and within budget. It was our first experience with wood pellet and TES ensured it went as smoothly as I would expect with an oil or gas installation."
Kilkenny College Renewable Energy Project
In the winter of 2006 TES worked together with the Board of Management of Kilkenny College to provide a Biomass Renewable Energy Project for the College. A biomass boiler was installed in a purpose built Energy Centre located in a remote location and energy in the form of hot water is transferred to a dormitory block by way of a network of insulated underground pipes.
There were two driving factors in the decision of Kilkenny College to implement a biomass project. Firstly the Board of the College were innovative in their decision that it was imperative that leading educational establishments such as Kilkenny College take a lead in the nationwide fight to combat climate change and reduce Ireland’s dependence on imported fossil fuels. The other main driver was cost. Heating costs are a substantial and increasing element of the running costs of all educational establishments. While a Biomass project can be over twice the cost of a traditional fossil fuel boiler house refurbishment, the availability of government grants and the major reduction in fuel costs mean that the additional capital expenditure can normally be readily justifiable. Therefore both environmental and financial drivers were instrumental in the decision to proceed with the biomass project. Kilkenny College was able to obtain grant aid from Sustainable Energy Ireland and this together with a contracted long term fuel supply with in built cost savings was seen by the College as ample justification to proceed.
TES was appointed by Kilkenny College to provide the project. The decision was made to build an Energy Centre consisting of a plant room and fuel store and holding all pipework, thermal storage and controls required for the installation.
A KWB TDS 150kw Wood Chip Boiler was chosen to be the installed boiler. These boilers are manufactured in Austria and have developed to be state of the art providers of wood fired boiler technology. The boiler was installed in tandem with a 2,000 litre fully insulated buffer vessel acting as thermal storage. This allows the heat store to act as a buffer between the relatively slow response time of a wood chip boiler and the more rapid load changes of a typical heating system. The buffer vessel also acts as an energy store to provide maximum output at start up.
An essential element of a Biomass project is fuel quality. After a tender process Nicholas Garvey Wood Chip Supplies was appointed as the fuel supplier for the installation. Nicholas is a director of Dragon Energy Ltd a nationwide company supplying wood chip fuel. Nicholas has developed the country’s first wood chip trailer capable of directly blowing wood chip into a clients fuel store. Nicholas provides fuel to Kilkenny College on a metered kilowatt hour basis and this means that Kilkenny College are charged each month only for the amount of energy that is actually used on site
