Lamellen House is a Cornish Victorian country house let for luxury holidays. It includes seven bedrooms and a large indoor swimming pool, together with gracious reception rooms in a beautifully landscaped garden. Adjacent to the main house is a converted barn. As both properties were heated by expensive to run oil and LPG boilers the owner asked Dunster to produce a feasibility study and, after a number of iterations, decided to install a pair of boilers with a sunken fuel store capable of being fuelled by either wood chip or miscanthus.

Fuel supply and chip handling

Fuel, either wood chips or miscanthus, is tipped directly into the sunken fuel hopper from delivery lorries. This means that there is no requirement for fuel handling on site and deliveries can be made quickly and easily by any local supplier. The hopper needs topping up with miscanthus every two to three weeks in winter or once a month if woodchip is used.

System design and installation

The system was designed to satisfy 100% of the heat and hot water demand of the properties from Biomass. However, when fuelled by miscanthus, the slighter lower heat output means that heating the pool either requires supplementary heat from the oil boilers or needs to be timed when demand from the other properties is low. The oil boilers which act as both a peak load or back up facility are automatically controlled by the biomass boilers to ensure the seamless delivery of heat. Given the nature of the properties this was considered a sensible precaution and avoided the installation of a larger system that would have produced smaller financial benefits.

Benefits

The project has brought substantial environmental and financial benefits to the estate and is contributing to the local economy through the fuel supply contract.

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