Stoking the home fires
During a February snowstorm in North Hudson, highway crews filled trucks with sand. Snowplows carved into the drifting banks of white. Summer seemed impossible.
Inside the garage it was toasty.
“You can tell it’s quite warm in here,” said Emmett Thompson, one of the highway department workers, as he walked around the 1,700 square-foot building.
Keeping the equipment thawed and workers cozy was an automated wood pellet boiler, a system that burns tiny pieces of wood to heat water and distribute it throughout the building. The water is stored in a large tank. The one inside North Hudson’s highway garage stands out like a yellow thumb. It is painted by local inmates to look like a minion, one of the characters from Universal Studios’ “Despicable Me” movies.
The boiler has a much more serious look—a sleek red box with a computer on its face. It is fed wood pellets from a 10-ton silo outside.
The system has provided a mixed experience for the town garage, which switched to mostly wood pellet heat around February 2018.
North Hudson isn’t the only one trying out this burgeoning energy system for which there is an ample fuel supply growing in and around the Adirondacks. The state’s offices in Ray Brook
