Mark Froling founded Froling LLC in 2002 as a general and mechanical contractor focused on alternative energy systems. One of the company’s most significant early projects was improving the wood pellet manufacturing systems at New England Wood Pellet’s plant in Jaffrey, NH. That work was the foundation of a strong relationship between the companies, resulting in Froling LLC building two additional wood pellet plants for NEWP in Schuyler
and Deposit New York. Combined, these three plants produce 244,000 tons of premium wood pellets each year.
With the mass production of wood pellets in northern New England, a new market was created (and necessary!) for the installation of wood pellet-fired heating systems that could consume all those pellets. At the same time, the price of heating oil and propane were reaching new highs which generated a great deal of interest in wood pellets as a heating fuel.
In 2010 Froling LLC changed it’s focus onto the unfolding pellet boiler market and began doing business as Froling Energy. Mark was continually on the lookout for the best wood pellet-burning boilers. He went to Europe to view their technology which was far more
advanced than any American products. The newly released automatic, self-cleaning pellet boilers by Froling and OkoFEN of Austria were exactly what was needed. Those became our “go to” boilers for all of our installations for the next 4 years.
After doing about 25 pellet boiler installations in schools, town halls, municipal buildings and residences the projects we were invited to bid began to get larger and larger. In time, we were installing multiple boilers to cover larger and larger loads in medium
sized commercial buildings--up to 800,000 BTU/hour. It was time for us to get into larger boilers--so long as they were high efficiency and low maintenance. This met with good success which showed us the strength of the middle market that included public schools, private schools and commercial buildings using 10,000 gallons of fuel oil each year.
In 2012 we were called to consult with Whelen Engineering in Charlestown, NH whose large campus of buildings were burning well over 100,000 gallons of fuel oil each year. The price volatility of oil was difficult to budget for and their extensive oil tank “farm” was in need of expensive repairs. The time was right for them to make an investment in a sensible alternative fuel. Mark was hoping to find an avenue to get into the production of “screened semi-dry wood chips”, a fuel product that had done very well in the middle market in northern Europe. These had proved to be a better investment: they cost about 1/3 less than wood pellets and the infrastructure costs were about 1/3 less than the construction costs of systems that burned low cost green (wet) wood chips. An agreement was struck--if Whelen built the boiler rooms, we would start producing screened semi-dry wood chips.
The first boiler room at Whelen Engineering was completed in September 2013. It was built
as part of a new production facility on the Whelen campus. Four 500,000 BTU/hour Froling TX boilers were installed, each with individual silos built into the boiler room directly behind each boiler. Froling Energy was not ready to provide dry wood chips during that first winter so Whelen had to burn wood pellets that first winter. However, we had committed to building a production facility by the following winter of 2014/15. A piece of property was leased in Peterborough where we built our first wood chip screener and dryer operation. A used mulch blower truck was bought and driven back to NH from California. New staff was hired to manage this fledgling operation. We were in business!
We named our new fuel PDCs: Precision Dry Wood Chips. They were screened wood chips, no bigger than 2.5” x 2.5” x 1/4” that were dried down to 25% moisture. With that as the criteria, we were able to blow them through a 5” diameter pipe into 30 foot tall steel silos. The low moisture content not only made the chips blowable but they also didn’t freeze up into solid masses in the silos in mid-winter. We discovered that quality control was critical!
In the years since our first PDCs were made in September 2014, Whelen Engineering has added two more PDC boiler rooms on their campus with a total output of over 9 million BTU/hour. In the winter of 2018/19 they offset the burning of 180,000 gallons of fuel oil with PDCs. Their cost for fuel has stabilized with PDCs at the equivalent of paying just $1.28 a gallon of #2 oil. With NH Thermal RECs that cost drops to just 80 cents a gallon!
In subsequent years Froling Energy has installed PDC-capable boiler systems at 8 other sites including Plymouth (NH) Regional High School, Conant High School in Jaffrey NH, Filtrine Manufacturing Co in Keene NH and Green Street School in Brattleboro, VT. At High Mowing School in Wilton, NH we converted their campus from multiple boiler rooms burning oil to a central plant burning PDCs--offsetting the use of over 30,000 gallons a year. We also set up a PDC burning boiler system that heats 103 apartments in 28 buildings at Applegate Apartments in Bennington, VT.
In the summer of 2018 we constructed a new boiler building and ran pipes to create a district heating system at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The district included 5 classroom buildings and 10 greenhouses at the Thompson School area on the UNH campus. The result is a beautiful building that runs as efficiently as it looks.
We look forward to doing more projects all over New England that offset more and more thousands of gallons of fuel oil. We are proud to say that in the winter of 2018/19 we delivered 5000 tons of PDCs offsetting 468,000 gallons of fuel oil. If we add in the fuel oil that all of our other boiler customers are no longer burning, the total offset that we have been involved in exceeds 1.2 million gallons of oil per year. That makes us happy!
