The WoodPECers are at it Again
The name of the game is making wood work.
May/June 1982
By the Mother Earth News staff
In the scramble to find domestically available energy resources, the old standby—wood—has received a heck of a lot of attention lately. Unfortunately, the rampant and injudicious use of this combustible hangs like a double-edged sword above the head of humankind: Burned directly, especially on a large scale, wood could be a serious source of air pollution ... and its widespread unchecked consumption could have an impact on the environment in more direct ways as well. (After all, it takes a good many years to produce a single hardwood tree.)
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Still, "woodburning" doesn't have to be a dirty word. In fact, the people at Wood Power Energy Corporation—in concert with the nursery firm of Miles W. Fry & Son—are taking some pretty impressive steps to demonstrate that cellulose combustion, when managed properly, can be both a practical and an economical alternative for "power hungry" Americans.
The Fry nursery folks, who are part of the "WoodPEC" group, are no strangers to long-time MOTHER-readers. (See "Hybrid Poplars", and "Homemade Motor Fuel ... From Firewood".) Back issue ordering information appears on page 148.) But the wood-powered, on-site energy system recently demonstrated by the WoodPEC organization takes the group's experiments in wood gasification one step further... and actually provides a sizable portion of the nursery's everyday energy requirements!
Greenhouses, you see, are costly to maintain ... particularly throughout the winter months. So the Pennsylvania-based group decided to modify its hothouse's existing oil-fired water-heating system to burn wood gas, by way of an automatically stoked, 1-1/2-million-BTU gasifier. Its 49-horsepower boiler easily supplies two 5,000-square-foot greenhouses (it's been designed to handle four such units), and a secondary heat recovery system insures that any normally wasted thermal energy gets recycled rather than dumped.
