Two hours north of New York City, in the beautiful Hudson River valley, is a 365-acre farm community with organic gardens, fields, two large greenhouses, 10 homes and a barn with pigs and cows. There’s also a dairy, bakery and pottery studio, all designed to serve young adults with developmental disabilities as residential or day students who are on the threshold of a transition into adulthood. Triform Community is staffed by men and women who have chosen to live in a community that is dedicated to helping young people with special needs. Today, there are 95 residents who enjoy life within the structured learning environment.

Last year, Triform managers tapped John Abularrage, owner of Stone Ridge, N.Y.-based Advanced Radiant Design, Inc. (ARD), to install a sophisticated wood burning boiler and thermal storage system as the source for several interior spaces. Abularrage visited the community and soon devised a plan to install a small district heating plant that would move BTUs underground. The heart of the system is a 170 MBH Fröling wood gasification boiler coupled with a 1,500-gallon thermal storage system.

“Fuel costs were chewing through the community’s reserves and, at the same time, preventing some of the desired facility improvements,” Abularrage recalled.

Over the past few years, ARD crews have installed a dozen or more Fröling cordwood-burning and wood pellet- burning boiler systems. He was confident that, after study- ing the community’s needs, the wood boiler/thermal storage solution, which is manufactured in Austria, would work ideally for them.

According to Abularrage, with so many complaints about smoke caused by the outdoor wood boilers that dot the countryside, many towns and states are cracking down on wood burning appliances. New emissions standards are pending at both the federal and state levels. That’s why state-of-the-art gasification “biomass” boilers – also to include U.S.-made wood boilers like those produced by another firm, Brocton, N.Y.-based Econoburn – are now regarded as among the best heating systems from an environmental standpoint.

“A two-stage combustion process burns standard fire- wood very cleanly and at very high efficiencies,” Abularrage explained.

The first stage is a traditional low-temperature wood fire and takes place in the upper firebox. This is also where wood is loaded into the boiler. The smoke and creosote vapor that would normally go up the chimney and into the atmosphere as visible smoke is, instead, burned as wood gas at 1,800°F to 2,000°F in a second, refractory-lined, combustion cham- ber. This high-temperature secondary combustion not only cleans up emissions dramatically, but also gives the boiler near condensing levels of efficiency. Unique to Fröling boilers is a “Lambda” control system that, based on oxygen levels in the exhaust, continuously adjusts both primary and secondary air settings to achieve optimal combustion throughout the burn cycle. The boiler control automatically modulates the induction fan speed based on boiler and thermal storage temperatures. This makes their gasification boilers some of the cleanest burn- ing, low NOx systems available.