Three Climate Smart Heating Solutions for Older Commercial Buildings and Schools

Three Climate Smart Heating Solutions for Older Commercial Buildings and Schools

When Board members and facility managers need to satisfy a mandate for affordability and climate-responsible heating, consider these three solutions.

Thank you to the pros at Froling Energy for this guest post!

1. Deploy Water Source Heat Pumps Without Drilled Wells
A worthy hybrid design uses a moderately sized wood pellet boiler to provide warm water for heat pumps, which would then raise heat distribution loop temperatures to normal and necessary levels for effective heating using existing forced hot water radiation. The pellet boiler usually fits well in the existing boiler room.

Significant Benefits: Installation cost is much lower due to the reuse of the heat distribution system. Lower maintenance costs due to not having to monitor and maintain multiple well systems. Lower fuel costs and use of locally sourced, renewable fuel for peaking and backup.

2. Convert to High-Efficiency Hot Water Boilers using Locally Sourced, Renewable Fuels
Install a high-efficiency, high-temperature boiler burning PDCs, wood pellets, or green wood chips, which are all the least costly heating methods per MMBTU in rural New England. These readily available fuels are truly sustainable and locally sourced, so keeping heating dollars in our region makes good economic sense.

Storage and Delivery: Wood pellets and PDCs require limited outdoor space for silos. Pellets are the most compact, and Green wood chips require the most space for fuel storage, but the fuel itself has the lowest cost.

3. Stay with Steam—but do it Renewably
Retrofitting buildings with steam heat to forced hot air or hot water is usually tricky and quite costly. Why not stay with steam? One of Schmid’s high-efficiency steam boilers can provide the sustainable heat that your clients are asking for using PDCs or green wood chips. Froling Energy is an experienced installer of Schmid’s reliable, low-emissions steam boilers.

For steam distribution systems that are at the end of life:
Or, where more heating control is desired, we suggest converting to a forced hot water system powered by a wood pellet, PDC, or green chip-fired boiler. Everything considered, this may be the best solution with the lowest cost fuels that are sustainable and locally sourced.

By considering these alternative heating solutions, facility managers and board members can achieve sustainability and cost-effectiveness in older commercial buildings and schools. These climate-smart options leverage locally sourced, renewable fuels and provide flexible approaches to upgrading existing heating systems with minimal disruption.

 

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.