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Date: 2/14/2023
PELHAM – Separating heat from winter air is still counter-intuitive, but after a full year of use the air source heat pump installed in the community center is drawing rave reviews from John Larsen, chair of the Energy Committee. People who frequent the building also appreciate the better quality of hot air produced by the unit.
“People who are in there every day have either noticed nothing, which I think is a good thing,” Larsen said, “or [they] said the quality of the heat in the winter is noticeably different, for the better.”
The community center building, located at the corner of Amherst and South Valley Roads, dates from the 1990s. It was built with an oil-fired hot water boiler that circulated heated water through baseboard units. That old and reliable heating technology kept the building warm, but with the downside that it burned too much oil and the heated air was very dry.
The building poses challenges for climate control. The structure serves many uses as a community center, but also as a library, police department, fire station, and often hosts committee meetings. The indoor temperature differs among use areas, differs from morning to night, differs according to the season, so the system had to allow for greater flexibility in operations.
Homeowners may be familiar with home heat pumps, but the unit installed at the Community Center is considerably larger and has much more adaptability. The system “can both heat and cool different parts of the building at the same time,” Larsen said. “If you’re in the police department offices it’s different than in the fire station bays … and [the system] is able to accommodate the different needs in the different parts of the building.”
Fire Chief Dennis Nazzarro, who works in the building, had no complaints. “It’s not hot in here, by any means,” Nazzarro said, “but it is comfortable.”
Larsen explained the new heat pump blows the heat around, but it’s not the same as forced hot air, which is “super dry.” The unit evenly spreads the heat around the building while reducing the use of the old boiler. A reduction in heating oil use, and a reduced use of fossil fuels generally, is one of the primary goals of the Green Communities program, which helped subsidize the new heating system.
“We’ve been able to reduce the heating oil use in the building by a substantial amount recently,” Larsen said. “I think our estimate is as much as a third.”
Larsen estimated the town is close to achieving the first goal for municipalities in the Green Communities program, a 20 percent reduction in fossil fuel use. The commonwealth’s program, first of its kind in the nation, with 290 of 351 communities enrolled, offers grants to promote sustainability initiatives. Another carrot of the program? The grants can get bigger, Larsen said, when a town reduces fossil fuel use by the 20 percent goal.
The town also won a Municipal Vulnerability and Preparedness [MVP] program grant for the new heating system. The installed cost was about $500,000, with Town Meeting contributing $125,000, or 25 percent. Larsen said the project would have been too expensive for the town without the grants.
The 20 percent reduction in fossil fuels is a near term possibility for Pelham because town officials were able to focus on the Community Center. The center and a neighboring structure, Pelham Elementary School, consume the most energy in town. The school was excluded from the Green Communities program because it’s operated by the regional district and the town has little control over classroom energy use.
“That’s a big reason why we’ve been able to make such big gains, because we’ve focused our attention on the single largest energy consumption building,” Larsen said.
The next step for energy conservation is a solar array to generate the energy needed to run the big heat pump. The town hasn’t made any significant commitments to solar generation yet, but the option is available. Larsen and other officials are waiting for state and federal developments that may prove a boon to the town’s interests.
“There’s a few procedural things we’re waiting on before we can get into any kind of serious conversations,” Larsen said about adopting solar generation. He said the new governor is promising more action in assisting towns to boost sustainability. “On top of that, the Federal Inflation Reduction Act expanded subsidy opportunities for municipal governments. We’re waiting for guidance on how that program is going to work so the town can take direct benefit from that.”
The effort to secure a new heating system in the Community Center began in 2017, with installation completed in 2021.