Longwood University has more than 4,000 students, hundreds of employees and dozens of buildings, and it keeps all of them warm with a wood fire.
The Southside school doesn't have to split wood to feed the fire _ it dumps in sawdust, which is plentiful from the region's forest-products industry.
"Longwood is doing something extremely smart and ecologically responsible," said Scott Hodges, Longwood's heating plant manager.
Longwood started burning wood on an experimental basis in 1983, prompted by environmental concerns and a desire for a less-expensive energy source than fuel oil. The school had to obtain approval from the state's Department of Environmental Quality to operate a wood-fired boiler. Initially, the school burned wood chips, sawdust and other types of wood products, but now it burns sawdust--mostly pine and some hardwood. It supplements the wood heat with oil when necessary.
Burning wood saves an estimated $3,000 a day compared with using oil to heat the campus, said Richard W. Bratcher, Longwood's vice president of facilities management and public safety.
As heating costs have risen, representatives of other schools have visited Longwood to see the operation, Bratcher said.
Years ago, the school heated with coal, but that is no longer an option, because fossil fuels tend to have a higher pollutant output and the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks through town have been pulled up, Bratcher said. Natural gas would be cost prohibitive, he said.
It helps that the school is in Prince Edward County and in a rural region of Virginia where there are numerous logging operations, Bratcher says.
"We've basically got the fuel source on our back doorstep," he said.
The sawdust supply is plentiful: "All of the (operations) are trying to get rid of it," Bratcher said.
Longwood stores sawdust at several locations, including a 5-acre site a few miles from campus. "When it's cold out, many times these saw mills are shut down," Bratcher noted.
Hodges said that at peak demand during the winter, Longwood burns about 600 tons of sawdust a week. The school pays between $13 and $18 a ton, depending on transportation costs.
From its storage shed beside the heating plant, the sawdust is dumped down a grate by a front-end loader. An elevator with buckets on a chain drops it onto another overhead conveyor that dumps it into a bin. Eventually, the fuel ends up in the furnace, where the temperature reaches 1,500 degrees.
A computer regulates the amount of sawdust that goes into the furnace.
Ash is separated from the furnace gases, said Joseph F. Gaither, director of operations and maintenance for UNICCO Integrated Facilities Services, which has the contract to handle the operation.
"The only thing going out the smoke stack is the gas," he said.
The school installed its current wood-fired boiler last year to replace two older units that were converted coal burners, and has plans for a larger $8 million wood-burning facility to be completed in two years. Then the school will convert completely to wood, Bratcher said.
Right now, when the temperature dips into the 30s, Longwood has to supplement the sawdust system with oil, Bratcher said. Once the new facility is built, that will no longer be the case.
"You don't think of technology when you think of wood furnaces, but there is quite a technology there, and the technology has grown by leaps and bounds the last 15 years," Bratcher said.Richmod Times-Dispatch via The Daily Press
