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MILLINOCKET – Robert Moscone is on the verge of realizing a dream he has worked at for more than 16 years.
Arrayed in and around Moscone’s Bates Street sales and service shop are the fruition of thousands and thousands of hours of toil and dreaming, science and speculation: chunky boxes made of thick steel sheets, piping, welds and insulation, spray-painted black.
They are boilers, 86 in all, whose unique design Moscone created with the help of an engineer who drew the blueprints. They are so much more efficient than most other boilers that they cut heating oil or natural gas bills by 30 to 50 percent or more, he and his customers say.
“I didn’t start out to build these things to sell them. I did it to prove something, but I had so many people who wanted the boiler. They wanted me to make it,” the 71-year-old said during a recent interview. “My boiler is selling itself because of the oil it saves.”
But it burns the lifelong town resident that he had to go to Mexico rather than Millinocket to manufacture his Moscone Bantam Mark I and II boilers in large numbers, despite having built the first prototype at a Millinocket foundry in 1989 and having sold about 260 so far that he built himself – piecemeal – since then.
Of the 86 that arrived Monday, his first sizeable shipment from Grupo Calorex S. de R.L. of the Federal District of Mexico, about 25 are presold, Moscone said. He expects the rest to sell within a few months, with another 100 coming as soon as Grupo Calorex can build them.
Still, the Moscones are impatient.
“It should have gone a lot faster than it has,” said Dennis Moscone, Robert’s son, who works for the Moscone Bantam Boiler Co. “Being in Millinocket has slowed this down. Nobody wants anything built in this town.”
Town Manager Eugene Conlogue agreed.
Despite the state having higher-than-average unemployment in the Katahdin region, an aching need for manufacturers willing to pay family-wage jobs, and a plethora of economic development agencies, some with multimillion-dollar budgets, Moscone has received little real help, Conlogue said.
State economic development agencies have made promises, but not delivered much help yet.
“People talk a great game, but they don’t show up with the money. This is always the No. 1 issue with everybody who wants to get into manufacturing,” said Conlogue, who has been trying to help Moscone for five years. “It’s a great loss to this area that every one of the boilers he makes doesn’t have ‘Made in Millinocket’ or ‘Made in Maine’ stamped into it.”
Jack Cashman, commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, agreed that the state’s efforts have not come to fruition yet, but denied that no one has tried to help Moscone. State officials are still trying to help Moscone, he said, but he faces difficult problems.
“He’s a very sharp guy, and he has got a good product there,” Cashman said. “The problem is, if you are going to have a factory of any size, you have to have a distribution network for your product. We set up some meetings with some interested parties but were unable to help him establish one.”
Most boilers, Moscone said, are made of cast iron and burn with flames pointed horizontally or burning upwards.
His Bantam boilers use Riello burners that point the flame and heat downward and use positive pressure to radiate heat through 90 inches to 108 inches of steel pipe and tubes – first an 8-inch-wide steel pipe atop which the burner sits, then horizontally and upward into an array of 14 two-inch steel transfer tubes around which water flows for heating before it is circulated to radiators or hot-water storage units.
The downward firing action, steel innards and the longer-than-typical journey of the flame and hot gases through the piping and tubes produces a better mix of fuel and air, resulting in a higher temperature burn that produces more heat than in typical boilers, Moscone said.
The increased burn efficiency produces a carbon dioxide content in the flue gases of 13 percent to 15.5 percent, indicating a very complete burn within the boilers, which carry Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association, Canadian Standards Association International, Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. and American Society of Mechanical Engineers certifications and a patent, according to Moscone’s Web site, mosconeboilers.com.
Steel also transfers heat more quickly than cast iron, adding to the efficiency, Moscone said.
Richard Hill, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maine and an energy researcher for more than 35 years, gave generally good marks to Moscone’s design.
Hill said that if Moscone’s carbon dioxide and flue temperature readings are accurate, they should help produce boilers that are only slightly more efficient than most state-of-the-art boilers, but could produce significant savings – in line with Moscone’s claim of 30 to 50 percent – if replacing older or outdated models.
“He seems to be squeezing a lot of energy out of the combustion, and that’s good,” Hill said. “It means that you are not wasting energy by putting excess air up the chimney.”
Gerald Caron of Millinocket saw the benefits when he replaced a Dynatherm Boiler with a Bantam in his Massachusetts Avenue house two years ago.
“I figure I save about 30 percent on my oil bills,” Caron, 77, said. “It’s also smaller than the old boiler, which saves space, and the hot water it generates is fantastic. I could turn it on in the basement and have a hot-water shower ready for me by the time I get upstairs.”
Moscone has a slew of customer testimonials from around the state. Millinocket’s town government bought two boilers and saw significant savings, Conlogue said, and East Millinocket just bought one for its water treatment plant, town officials said.
Jerry Tudan, an energy management consultant in Harpswell who has worked with industry and commercial interests throughout the Northeast for 30 years, said he finds Moscone’s product “just short of amazing.
“He has got a product that is very, very worthy of going to the marketplace. I can’t find anything seriously negative to say about this,” Tudan said.
Tudan said he has consulted with a Millinocket building owner who has a Moscone boiler and computed that the building used about a third less heating oil than it should have required.
“I can’t tell you any better than that the efficiencies he gets are unlike anything that is out there commercially available that I have seen,” Tudan said. “They perform exactly the way Mr. Moscone says they will. I think the Moscone boiler is a diamond in the rough and I would love to see them become a major operation right there in Millinocket.”
Moscone’s design is essentially an update of a type of boiler produced by General Electric in the 1930s that was more efficient than typical boilers but eventually failed, among other reasons, because it was difficult to find mechanics qualified to service and maintain it, Hill said.
“Like a lot of GE products, it was over-engineered,” he said.
Moscone, who said he was influenced by the GE boiler, solved the maintenance issues, Hill said, by using burners made by Riello, an international designer and builder of oil, gas, dual-fuel and low nitrogen oxide burners.
“Every mechanic knows how to deal with a Riello burner,” Hill said.
Cashman and Hill agreed that Moscone’s biggest challenge won’t be producing a good boiler, but getting it to market.
It is extremely difficult to break into the boiler market, which they described as very competitive and clannish, particularly with oil burner salesmen and servicemen who stick with what they know and with names consumers are comfortable with.
Banks and other investors would shy away from putting money into a design that was less than revolutionary or lacked a solid marketing plan. Word of mouth won’t likely be enough, Hill said.
Moscone said he has gone to several banks in the area without success and never gotten much of an explanation from them as to why.
He does, however, have an investor, who he declined to name, interested in putting money into his product, and has a partner in his local efforts in Richard Day, a local woodmill owner and businessman.
Moscone has a dealer in Augusta who is helping him market his product, and has sold boilers already to residents or companies in Bath, Greenville, Trenton, Bangor and Houlton, among other places, Moscone said.
Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council Executive Director Bruce McLean met Tuesday with Penobscot County officials and got tentative approval to get Moscone’s Bates Street business declared a Pine Tree Zone. County officials must sign off on the deal because Moscone’s office is just outside town lines, McLean said.
The designation would allow Moscone to claim tax refunds and exemptions, reduced electrical rates and tax increment financing. As part of the zone, he must pay workers at least $10.76 an hour, plus benefits.
Now Moscone must apply to have his business become a Pine Tree Zone, McLean said.
“We have a few steps to go yet,” McLean said. I have a feeling that his business in particular is going to be finally able to get something going there.”
Conlogue and Moscone agreed. Moscone is looking to expand and hinted he will have some news soon.
“He needs a big-hit order that [he] can roll over quickly and invest back into the company,” he said. “Once he finds a wholesale buyer, he could go great guns up there.
“I think in time this is going to be a big-selling thing,” Moscone said. “I think we can put a lot of people to work in this area.”
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