ULLSWATER, CUMBRIA – Lake District haven Park Foot Camping & Caravan Park, the AA’s Holiday Centre Of The Year 2015 and one of the UK’s most picturesque motorhome, camping and caravanning parks, is heading for its first winter with a new eco-friendly way to heat its buildings on the shores of Ullswater.
Park Foot’s clubhouse, shop and self-catering lodges, all built from local stone, are now kept warm by a low- CO2 woodchip biomass heating plant provided by acclaimed Scandinavian biomass boiler manufacturer Osby Parca, a division of Enertech AB, Sweden.
The firm’s 200kW woodchip boiler now powers Park Foot’s fourteen stone-built properties using a principle known as district heating, in which heat is created in a central location and supplied via insulated pipes to a group of independently metered buildings.
The new Osby Parca boiler sits in its own purpose-made building at the heart of the large Park Foot complex. Built into a hillside and painted green, it is designed to be unobtrusive in an area of outstanding natural beauty.
The park’s new wood biomass heating system was designed and installed in December 2014 especially for Park Foot, by UK-based bio-energy specialists Bio-Nordic, in partnership with expert fitters HFB Heating of Selby.
Six months on, Park Foot reports that its new district heating network, which is central to their green agenda including reducing the park’s CO2 footprint, is working efficiently and successfully.
“District heating is a relatively new concept to the UK, but it is the norm in Scandinavia” said James Haigh, Director of and chief consultant at Bio-Nordic.
“We’re calling Park Foot our Lake District Heating project. We’d like to think that Alfred Wainwright, whose books about the Lake District are so revered around the world, would approve as an environmentalist. The team at Park Foot are making a clear statement about the importance of the environment with their new bio-energy heating system.
“Their beautiful park is heading into its first winter season with a well thought-out and ecologically-considerate approach to heating. It is a working example of group-sized Scandinavian district heating principles, using exactly the same principles we would use to power much larger projects such as community housing, airports, industrial sites or even entire cities”.
He continued: “The 200kW Osby Parca boiler we installed has proven over its first few months to be the right size for Park Foot. A lot of people mistakenly buy an oversized boiler when converting to a low- CO2 biomass solution, ending up with a less-efficient system and paying for heating capacity which they simply don’t need. Park Foot now has an extremely eco-friendly system which is hugely scalable, and which can grow highly efficiently if Park Foot also chooses to grow”.
Barbara Allen, director of Park Foot Caravan & Camping Park, said: “We are very pleased with our new ‘green’ heating system, which is just one of several ways in which we are improving our carbon footprint here at Park Foot.
“Like every responsible modern business we are always looking to become more eco-friendly, and with the government’s Renewable Heat Incentive helping us to recoup the cost gradually, and the fact that woodchip is a relatively cheap fuel, we feel it was also a good business decision to install our new biomass heating system.
“When you rely on oil and gas heating, your costs are effectively at the mercy of what happens in other countries. We are a lot happier now we are dealing with a locally-sourced woodchip fuel supplier. Going into the winter, around 80% of our heating needs will be powered by the new Osby Parca biomass boiler, and the heating system which Bio-Nordic created.
“Six months after first turning it on, the new system is well-balanced and working well. Our heat meters can be read remotely by Bio-Nordic’s ‘Sycous’ system, so they can monitor how efficiently it is all working and provide the data we need for the regular RHI reports. We can promise our customers that our lovely stone-built lodges and buildings will be just as warm and cosy as ever when winter comes!”
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CONTACT BIO-NORDIC: James Haigh, Managing Director, james@bio-nordic.co.uk, +44 (0)1133 845725. Bio-Nordic Ltd, Leeds Innovation Centre, 103 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9DF, West Yorkshire, UK