Sustainable Heating Solutions

Sustainable Heating Solutions

Solar Heating Explained

There are three broad categories of solar heating: passive solar, solar hot water, and solar photovoltaic paired with a cold climate heat pump (CCHP.) That last one is … Read more

Wood Pellet Furnace

A pellet furnace runs on the most affordable heating fuel with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions. With an environmentally-responsible wood pellet furnace you can choose to get your … Read more

Sustainable Forestry

Think of a tree as a solar battery. As a tree grows, sunlight, rainfall, and carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere combine to store the sun’s energy. Contrary … Read more

Outdoor wood pellet storage bin

Bulk Wood Pellet Storage

When it comes to wood pellet storage you’ve got options—outdoor, indoor, and site-built. Most pellet storage bin designs receive pneumatic, bulk truck delivery for hands-off convenience. Sizes range … Read more

Pellet Fuel Delivery

The following companies deliver wood pellet heating fuel with pneumatic delivery trucks directly to your on-site storage bin for fully-automatic, hands-free heating. Connecticut Sandri Energy Solutions, Greenfield, MA … Read more

Wood Pellet Heating

Your decision to switch from fossil fuel heating to renewable, automated wood pellet central heating is something consequential you can do right now to reduce your carbon footprint. … Read more

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.