Bohart Guest House
Renewable Energy Installation
Built 1889, Guest House
Since 1998
aka Bozeman Cottage
Page Last Updated:
Wednesday August 08, 2007
Beginning in the Fall of 2004, I began installation of a fully renewable heating system - decentralized, low-tech heat from solar and wood. The wood came from a local furniture makers that produce about a billion btu's per month worth of oak fuel, so instead of going to the landfill to turn into wood chips, some of it went into the boiler to make heat for the house, hot tub and backyard '69 Airstream office. Being that I don't live on site, the multiple trips every day to build fires in the boiler were too much, so in February 06 I replaced it with a vegetable oil fired boiler. The oak firewood is still processed and sold locally, mostly as fuel for Tulikivi fireplaces.
This
oil goes into a modern looking
AgSolutions 200k Btu boiler, highly efficient and clean burning
on used vegetable oil.
The boiler holds 30 gallons of water and circulates heat from the
garage to the house through buried, insulated pipes. Inside the house
there is a Takagi on-demand gas water heater that takes over when the main
boiler happens to shut off and has no hot water to give.
For a review of the practical aspects of this boiler unit, click here.
The other heat source is the
amazingly simple and affordable solar hot water heater:
Seido solar hot water collector tubes mounted on south-facing
roof - 8' long x 6' wide
Here is a closer look at the Seido brand solar collector - evacuated glass tubes have flat black metal plates inside that transfer heat up into the header tube where the water is circulated. On a cloudy winter day these units produce 140 degree water! Sunny winter day - 190.
$1345 with shipping for the panel, Grundfos UP10-15F pump with ISO flange, pressure gauge, fill valve, expansion tank VR-15, HE-DTT-94 controller with 2 sensors, Goldline SP-30D dual relay controller.
www.planetarysystems.com, go to the PDF section and look under solar hot water.
http://sundasolar.com/product.htm is the manufacturer's web site
In the basement of the house there are 2 water tanks with heat
exchanger coils in them for storing all this heat. The heat gets used in
the following ways:
1. by using hot water for showers, laundry, etc (domestic hot water or dhw),
2. by heating the house (a radiator was inserted into the furnace duct so
fan-driven air passes by 180-degree water on its way to the living space),
3. by the hot tub, which has underground hot water lines leading out to it (the
original electric heater exists as a backup heater for the tub),
4. and by heating my 1969 Airstream Office in the way back of the yard behind
the fence.
So with the 3 heat sources and the 4 heat consumers, the
system gets a little complicated looking and I won't try to label all the parts,
but the blue tank on
the right is where the solar heated water is stored;
the left blue tank stores the heat from the boiler or the backup gas heater;
the white box on the right is the backup gas heater, and all the 1-inch copper
is the loop thru which the hot water circulates until it finds a place that
needs heat.
Hot Tub with all the modern characteristics except the power bill!
How did I calculate my CO2 savings? www.carboncounter.org has a handy calculator for home energy, transportation energy, etc. Vegetable oil is grown which consumes carbon dioxide, so when it is burned and releases carbon dioxide the numbers balance and it is therefore considered carbon neutral. In addition to the carbon savings at the guest house, I estimate that I've saved 16.5 tons of CO2 per year by driving on vegetable oil (see below).
I invite you to test out this system which, for the most part, runs on oil that would otherwise be trucked to Spokane for filtering then trucked to who knows where to be turned into animal feed product, chapstick, or a number of other products. I'll add the specs for this system soon if you're interested in brand names and model numbers. Feel free to email me if you have questions or interests. I am available for new installations and would recommend starting with solar hot water.
Paul
Bozeman Cottage World Headquarters, ofr course, also heated with hot water from the
boiler
If you are interested in the above, then visit my BIOFUELS page for Bozeman: www.bozemanbiofuels.com
The garage at the Bohart Guest House is home to my waste vegetable oil filtering
(WVO) system. I collect used deep fryer oil, or french fry oil as it's
sometimes called, from local restaurants (ironically from a restaurant called
the Garage up the street, which of course used to BE a garage), heat it in
my
garage with hot water heat from the wood boiler, then filter it into storage
drums and eventually it winds up in either making heat for the guest house or in
one of my vegoil-burning vehicles. The truck as a 105-gal secondary fuel tank
(94 Chevy 6.5L
turbo diesel truck) and the Suburban has an 18-gal tank under the drivers side. If you haven't heard of this, or you don't believe it,
then your first questions will be:
Q You're kidding, right?
A regular diesel engine can't use WASTE VEGETABLE OIL?
A Sounds like fiction but let's go for a ride and then see what you
say. It's better for the engine, runs quieter and produces a fraction of
the emissions of diesel burning engines. Actually, the diesel engine was
designed to run on peanut oil, this petroleum thing is just a temporary
sidetrack.
Q What do you have to do
to the oil before it can be used as diesel fuel?
A Collect it, warm it up to 90 degrees F so it will pour into Levi
pant leg 'sock' filters hanging in a 55-gallon filter drum, warm it to 120F
and hold for 8 hours to evaporate out any water, then pump it thru a real fuel
filter into a gas can or holding drum. Next stop: boiler's fuel tank
or diesel tank and fuel
system on one of the the trucks
where it is filtered one more time before the injection pump feeds it to the
6.5L turbodiesel.
Q Vehicle modifications?
A The trucks have 2 fuel tanks, one with diesel or biodiesel for
starting the engine, and another using waste heat from the engine to heat the vegoil
in the other tank so it will flow to
the heated filter, then it's fed to the engine which is already warm from
running for about 1-5 minutes on diesel or biodiesel fuel. The engine needs no
modification since it was designed to burn peanut oil in 1897 by Rudolf Diesel,
inventor of the worlds first internal combustion engine. Here's a concept:
invent an engine that runs on oils that can be farmed, then use the oil as fuel
to farm more oil crops like peanuts, canola, soybeans, etc. This process
is 324% efficient, despite the recent reports put out by the oil industry.
By contrast, refining diesel fuel from petroleum is only 84% efficient, so what
they're saying about biodiesel is how they should be criticizing the making of
diesel. Vegetable oil and/or Biodiesel is domestic,
doesn't need to be drilled for or hauled in ocean tankers, refined or spilled
anywhere along the way. Of course, if it does happen to spill you can just
lick it up.
Q What kind of mileage
do you get? How about performance?
A About 20 mpg, just like diesel (diesel engines are 40% more
efficient than gas ones, so that's how a big 3/4 ton truck gets better mileage
than the standard, relatively small SUV. Technically there is supposed to
be a 5-10% drop in horsepower, but at 330 hp it's a little hard to tell.
Q How many miles have
you driven so far on WVO?
A 15,000 as of March 06, starting May 13, 2005
Q How does it feel?
A Burning oil that's grown right here at home that
has nothing to do with Iraq or Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or the Exxon
Valdez? Not only that, but this is oil that has already been used to cook your french fries, requires a whopping 0.1-1 miles of transporting, and creates a
fraction of the emissions compared to dino diesel. It feels allright.
Q What is Biodiesel?
A Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil, much like brewing beer.
It does not require a second fuel tank or any vehicle modifications, so it's more attractive to the
mainstream, but the engines are just fine burning straight vegetable oil so I
went that route. For much more info, visit
bozemanbiofuels.org which has links to all
the nationally accredited biodiesel and WVO web sites. There's a reason
the Navy burns 20% biodiesel, and entire vehicle fleets across the country are
running on it, including government and public transportation fleets as well as
privately owned.
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