Burning Straw, Not Money!

Having been persuaded of the benefits of a Graso straw-burning boiler to provide heat to be stored in large thermo-tanks at Guy and Wright’s tomato- growing greenhouses in Essex (see The Commercial Greenhouse Grower June 2013), Rob Jones has joined forces with Arkadiusz Dobrowlski and Gerald King to form ARG Biomass Ltd writes Richard Shepherd-Barron. 

ARG Biomass is a specialist supplier of straw-fired boilers for agricultural and industrial uses. They will design and supply a project to provide the advantages that are available under the Government’s Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme. The three directors bring a wide range of knowledge and experience to the new business: Rob Jones has a technical background as a race mechanic in many forms of motor racing (from Formula One to touring cars) as well as a good knowledge of horticulture gained with his family’s business – Guy and Wright.

Arkadiusz has been working at Guy and Wright for the past eight years as manager of their renewable energy enterprises. The company have a large AD plant which uses their own and other companies’ green waste). Gerald’s background is in heating and fuel installations for a wide range of industries including pipework installations for protected growers in the Lea Valley.

The boiler supplier is the Polish company Graso who have been making straw burning boilers for over ten years, having supplied several hundred customers in Poland and other countries. ARG say that the Graso boilers are compact, reliable and long lasting. They are guaranteed for twelve months and have all necessary certificates to comply with flue gas emission standards. ARG favour manual loading of straw bales (large or round) and reckon that their installations can be two-thirds of the cost of an automatic system. Loading isn’t normally a problem as most larger farmers and growers have a fork-truck or front end loader available.

Rob Jones said: “Our 1MW boiler can heat up to three acres of greenhouses and we can design the entire system to fit in exactly with our customer’s needs. We can provide significant fuel cost savings by converting an old heating system to straw and I would expect the likely pay- back through the RHI payments to be in the region of four years. In addition to cost savings, straw-fired boilers help “tick the box” in the ever increasing list of environmental requirements for produce”.