Charity Wins £5000 to produce Heat from Waste Wood

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Posted by Trevor Bell on Nov 13, 09 03:43 PM in Bloggers

Sleekburn Renewable Woodfuel Initiative have won a £5000 award from Newcastle University to develop ways of reducing energy costs by recycling waste heat.

Manager Neil Hedley explained;- ''We are part of Blyth Star enterprises, mental health charity and make logs and oven dried kindling for wood burning stoves and fires. Our waste wood products are used to produce heat for the factory and we realised that we may be able to put this to better use and cut our energy bills. We contacted Newcastle University and they were very enthusiastic to help and we are delighted that we have been awarded £5000 to develop our energy saving ideas...

"As a charity we need to save money and predict that we can cut our energy bills in half by using our waste heat , to preheat the air entering the kiln and also by recycling the hot exhaust air through a heat exchanger to use it again.

This is an exciting time for woodfuel and as demand grows we can use the waste to produce heat and reduce our own energy costs and carbon footprint."

The grant will be used to work with the Universities specialist thermal engineer Dr Terry Heppenstall and give us valuable cost savings which helps the sustainability of our training programmes.

We also hope the knowledge gained can be shared and repeated throughout industry to reduce carbon emissions in the U.K.

Neil can be contacted at 'The Woodfuel Centre' on 01670 857138 (photo shows Neil Hedley and Dr Terry Heppenstall in front of the Kiln.)

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