Hever Castle is a complex site near Edenbridge in Kent. It consists of the original Tudor home of the Boleyn family together with the mock Tudor Village built by Lord Astor in the early twentieth century to provide residential and hotel accommodation, plus associated restaurants, offices and ancillary buildings. The Castle and Tudor Village were heated from a central oil fired boiler with ancillary buildings using a mixture of oil, LPG and solid fuel boilers as well as some electrical heating. The existing heating did not perform satisfactorily and was expensive to operate.
MCA Consulting Engineers were appointed to design a central biomass district heating system to cover as much of the site as practical, which eventually served the Castle, Tudor Village and many of the ancillary buildings. As well as normal design and supervisory roles for the scheme, MCA also obtained grant aid for the client from the BioEnergy Capital Grant scheme and interest free loans from the Carbon Trust to help finance the whole scheme. MCA also provided assistance to the owners in sourcing their fuel supply and the design of the new boilerhouse and associated fuel storage area.
The boiler selected was a Binder RRK wood chip boiler rated at 650kW with 2 accumulator tanks totalling 40,000 litres. Heating to all areas was taken through a network of pre-insulated buried mains with interface units or plate heat exchangers acting as a demarcation between the new installation and existing heating systems.
The performance of the heating system was dramatically improved together with a major reduction in operating costs.
As a subsequent phase of the works for the site, a small Windhager log boiler was installed to provide heating to a refurbished restaurant. This was located too far from the main biomass district heating mains to make an extension of those mains economically viable. The limited operating times for the restaurant make the use of a log boiler appropriate with manual loading of the logs on a daily basis acceptable.