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%.”
“The breakthrough came during testing and field trialling with boilers successfully using 100% biofuel known as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO ). While HVO is a relatively new fuel to Ireland, in Europe and the UK it is used for Marine and Public Transport and to power generators. In Europe, Neste a Finnish company, is the largest producer of HVO with plants in Finland and Rotterdam.”
“The use of 100% 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% 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.
While readily available in continental Europe, HVO is only starting to become available in Ireland. Current distributors include Nicholl Oil in Carryduff, Co. Down and Inver Energy in Blackpool, Co. Cork.
