Grant, Ireland’s leading home heating appliance manufacturer, has invested over €250,000 in pioneering a major R&D breakthrough that could help reduce carbon emissions in rural and hard to heat homes.
The breakthrough will also help prevent Irish homeowners from incurring the high cost and subsequent disruption to daily life of deep retrofitting.
Over the past six years the Grant R&D team has worked with third level institutions, industry partners and renewable fuel producers, focusing on more sustainable and carbon saving fuels and innovating its boilers to be biofuel compatible.
Commenting on the R&D project, founder Stephen Grant said that in the early days of their research, they identified potential bio and synthetic fuels that would both meet greenhouse gas reduction targets and be commercially viable.
“This began with developing a boiler that could use a biofuel called FAME (fatty acid methyl esters ). Our team successfully used a 30% blend of FAME with regular kerosene, although problems arose when the blend of biofuel exceeded 30 percent.
“The breakthrough came during testing and field trialling with boilers successfully using 100 percent biofuel known as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO ). HVO feedstocks are generally rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, certified sustainable palm oil and non-food oils such as jatropha oil and algae oil as well as waste animal fats. Even more sustainable are waste and residue oils – both of which are now a substantial contributor to the feedstock.
“The use of 100 percent HVO, can result in around 88% reduction in carbon emissions and using this or a percentage blend of HVO with kerosene, will enable rural and hard to heat Irish homes to transition to a renewable green alternative from 100 percent kerosene at an affordable cost and minimum disruption to their home lives.
“All new Grant condensing boilers are future-proofed to use HVO through making a slight modification to the boiler. Older Grant condensing boilers can also be adapted to HVO, these modifications can be carried out by a service engineer during an annual service,” Mr Grant stated.
