A problem with a pilot-program boiler and questions about a delivery system are delaying a Haines Borough plan to replace oil-burning heat systems with ones that burn wood pellets.
The borough received $1.2 million from the state last year to pursue the biomass project, but public facilities director Carlos Jimenez said this week he wouldn’t be purchasing more pellet boilers until a continuing problem with one installed at the Haines Senior Center is figured out.
“I am confident this project will be successful, but we are not willing to dive in head-first before we know the pool is full,” Jimenez said.
The OkoFEN boiler, installed in November 2012, has failed twice in the past six months due to disintegration of a “flame tube” that encases the burn chamber, Jimenez said.
The same part recently failed on an OkoFEN boiler installed at a local grocery store, he said. The Chilkoot Indian Association this week reported a similar problem occurred in its OkoFEN boiler.
“This isn’t a problem limited to this particular boiler,” Jimenez said. The senior center boiler shut itself down Dec. 26, requiring borough staff to heat the building with a woodstove and electric heaters for about 10 days.
Jimenez said representatives of OkoFEN’s U.S. distributor told him the problem may rest with the pellets the borough is using, which may be too soft or contain a chemical that is reacting with metals. The pellets are manufactured in Washington state and distributed regionally by Juneau’s Sealaska Corp. “It’s supposedly a premium-plus pellet,” Jimenez said.
He said he has sent samples of the pellets to the distributor and would send them to a third-party lab to determine their general composition, including chemical composition and density.
Jimenez said he has been told the boiler is turning on and off too many times. The device has operated for about 6,400 hours and has fired up more than 15,000 times. “It should be able to handle as many fire-ups as need be.”
Jimenez also has received conflicting information on whether the burner should be operating on a “summer” or “winter” setting.
Jimenez said that the burner is a “beautiful system” when it’s working, but that pellet technology is still in the early stages of development. “Oil boilers took decades to work the way they do right now.”
The borough solicited proposals for a delivery system for pellets last summer, but there were no responsive proposals, Jimenez said. The borough has said it must find a supplier that can provide up to 40 tons of pellets a month. Sealaska can deliver only 10 tons at a time.
“Until we can find a source for as many pellets as we need on a regular delivery schedule, we can’t really more forward,” acting economic development director Christina Baskaya said last fall.
A borough-funded study in 2012 recommended against switching to pellet boilers. Jim Rehfeldt of Alaska Energy Engineering pointed to “considerably more maintenance” for pellet boilers and a boiler lifespan that’s half that of oil burners as among reasons to hold off on the change.
“The prudent course of action is to wait and see how this energy source plays out over time,” Rehfeldt said, noting that even in places close to pellet plants, there’s been no mass switch to wood heat.
Wood-pellet boilers have been installed in recent years at Chilkoot Estates subdivision apartments, the Chilkoot Indian Association office, Eagle’s Nest Motel and Olerud’s Market Center. Biomass advocates have said that the addition of pellet burners to the community would improve the economics for development of a pellet-producing plant here.
CIA acting administrator Scott Hansen said an OkoFEN boiler in the tribe’s office has malfunctioned twice in its first year. A flame sensor burned out and a circuit board relay that controlled automatic pellet loading also failed.
The flame sensor was a “minor item” but the failure of the circuit board was disturbing, as he’d expect that to last for the life of the boiler, Hansen said.
Jimenez said he also has heard of problems with pellet-burning boilers in public buildings in Ketchikan.