Hellinghayes Farm is a free range poultry farm registered as a ‘Freedom Foods’ producer. The initial project brief was to reduce the LPG costs across the site whilst improving bird welfare through better controlled heating and a drier environment.

Dunster analysed the heating profiles over the entire growing cycle ranging from 32°C at the day-old stage right down to an ambient unheated temperature towards maturity. Heating demands had also to meet seasonal and external temperatures. The key to the whole project was to ensure reliability and control as poultry are highly sensitive to unplanned temperature changes.

Fuel supply and chip handling

Although the farm itself does have access to some woodland this was not enough to sustain both systems. Deliveries are therefore made through a third party fuel supplier by walking-floor articulated lorries, delivering 92m³ per load. This minimises the transport cost. With the woodchip ‘walked out’ into a bulk store this is then transferred periodically to each boilers fuel store by the farms tele-handler.

System design and installation

Dunster designed the biomass and the plant room using our in-house CAD team. Dunster worked with the heat exchanger and control suppliers to ensure the correct specification for each heat emitter. Heat emitters were mounted on specially made brackets to ensure that an even heat distribution was achieved whilst at the same time allowing for them to be moved out of harm’s way during the cleaning cycle.

Dunster designed and built an independent control system for each shed so that temperature control was independent of the Whaler controls retained for the existing LPG system as back-up.

Benefits

In addition to the attractive 18% return on investment bird welfare has significantly improved due to better heat distribution, a drier environment and drier dander, leading to better returns from happier and healthier birds.

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