EAST MILLINOCKET – Armed with recently acquired Pine Tree Zone status and a $10,000 state grant, two town businessmen have launched a factory that is building outdoor, environment-friendly wood-fired residential boilers and will have 40 workers on its payroll by January, they said Friday.

Jeffrey W. Baker and boiler inventor Dominic Federico predict that their Clean Woods Heat LLC will be making 20 90,000-Btu Black Bear boilers a week from their building in the Katahdin Regional Industrial Park off Route 157 by the end of September.

“We’ll have two assembly lines running right through there,” Baker said Friday as he pointed down the factory floor.

Formerly Universal Welding Co., in business in East Millinocket since 1996, Clean Woods employs 12 workers. It will have 25 full-timers by early September as the company ramps up production of its boiler, with a grand opening planned for October, Baker said.

“By then we should be fully operational,” Federico said.

Federico and Baker hope to have 60 full-time workers producing 1,500 to 2,000 boilers at 2 Dirigo Drive by 2008, they said. This is good news for the Katahdin region, which typically has unemployment double the state average and almost 50 percent of its population at or below the poverty line.

The company also plans to launch a factory in New Brunswick next month.

For Baker, 43, of East Millinocket, and Federico, 50, of Medway, the launchings are the result of decades of work. Baker is happy to be in his new business. As owner of Universal Welding, he and his workers fabricated about 4 million pounds of steel annually, including for Kohl’s and Old Navy stores and the Webber 3 building at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, he said.

“Dominic has had an idea in his head for 22 years and I gave him the keys to this shop. He made the boiler and I made it manufacturable,” Baker said. “The fact of it is that we have changed this industry. We are taking out the dirty burners and bringing outdoor wood-[fired] boilers their name back.”

Cleaner burner, cleaner air

Louis Fontaine, compliance manager for the Bureau of Air Quality at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, wasn’t quite ready to agree with that statement, not yet having seen final air-quality test data on the BB-90.

But he and Elizabeth Crabtree, a seed grant project manager for the Maine Technology Institute, a state-funded, private nonprofit organization that awarded Clean Woods Heat the $10,000 grant, said the Black Bear boiler is an innovative technology that could significantly advance the outdoor boiler industry.

“From the preliminary information, it looks like it is going to be a good improvement over what’s out there for outdoor wood boilers,” Fontaine said Friday. “It sounds very promising, and with the price of heating oil going up, it would be nice if people could use an alternative.”

By reputation, Baker said, most wood-fired boilers are smoky, smelly contraptions with short stacks that alienate neighbors with plumes of creosote-soaked smoke. Some, Fontaine said, have been banned by municipalities in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York because they are such polluters.

Most outdoor wood-fired boilers produce 25 to 111 grams of solid particulate waste an hour, Fontaine said, although Baker believes they produce 100 to 400 grams an hour. By comparison, most wood-fired stoves today produce about 7.5 grams an hour. Federal Environmental Protection Agency guidelines encourage 24 to 37 grams an hour from wood-fired boilers.

Early tests indicate that, at worst, the BB-90, which is UL- and CSA-certified, produces 20.3 grams an hour, a significant improvement, Fontaine and Baker said.

“That is very low for wood boilers, and we are very encouraged to hear those kinds of numbers,” Fontaine said. “They are using technology – high-tech heat exchangers and ceramics – that no one else is using in wood boilers right now.”

The decreased wood wastes spewed from Black Bear smokestacks means that besides being environmentally friendly, the boiler burns with far greater efficiency than most wood burners, saving consumers money on wood fuel.

Baker estimates that a typical house can be heated with three to five cords of wood a year. That’s because the Black Bear’s ceramics and steel trap enough heat to burn the wood at as much as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, eliminating creosote before it gets into the stack, and yet is well enough insulated to almost be cool to the touch and safe for indoor installation, he said.

The engine in the boiler and its temperature controls allow the boiler to stop burning wood until the thermostat calls for more heat, Baker said.

Winning a grant

The Black Bear’s performance and potential were enough to get the company the $10,000 grant from MTI of Gardiner. Of 52 applicants, they were among 14 winners of seed money grants examined by nine volunteer reviewers representing the state’s forestry, biotech, information technology, composite materials, precision manufacturing, environmental and aquaculture sectors, Crabtree said.

MTI was created by the Legislature to award grants to research and development projects that lead to a greater use of Maine’s resources and technology, said Tucker Kimball, MTI communications manager.

MTI’s reviewers and board of directors examine 50 proposals bimonthly, awarding grant money to about 20.

The organization issues about $8 million in awards annually, Kimball said.

“The board of directors felt the project was innovative and had the potential to strengthen Maine’s environmental and forestry sectors and well as improving Maine’s economy,” Kimball said.

Most completed projects help a business grow an average of 11 percent, and most MTI clients go on to purchase a third of their materials and two-thirds of services from within the state, he said.

Grant applications can garner as much as $25,000 in seed grants, with $10,000 being the typical amount awarded for first-time applicants such as Clean Woods.

A growing market

An outdoor wood boiler that burns cleaner and overcomes the poor reputation most such boilers are saddled with could make a dent in the relatively small outdoor wood boiler market, particularly in a rural state such as Maine, where the lack of population density makes smoke less of an issue, Fontaine said.

From 1990 to 2005 almost 2,000 outdoor wood boilers were installed in Maine, but the recent oil and gas crunch has state DEP officials estimating that another 500 will be installed by Jan. 1 – a significant increase, Fontaine said.

“There are people out looking for alternatives for oil that fit outside the house,” he said.

Sales across the United States have similarly increased, from about 4,800 in 1999 to more than 15,000 in 2003. Based on partial data for 2004, it is estimated that 24,500 boilers were sold across the U.S. in 2004. From 1999 to 2005, at least 77,500 units were sold nationwide, according to an October 2005 report done by the New York State Environmental Protection Bureau.

Most state DEPs and the EPA are likely to enact stronger air-pollution control regulations by 2009 to cut down on outdoor wood boiler emissions that will kill outdoor wood-burning boiler manufacturers that fail to improve their products to meet the new standards, Fontaine said.

This could provide an opportunity for companies like Clean Woods, he said.

“We are hoping that we will find wood boilers that come closer to the wood stove standard,” Fontaine said.

Looking to expand

Baker attributed much of the company’s success to the Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council, a quasi-public agency aimed at creating business in East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket. MAGIC helped the business get the MTI grant and the Pine Tree Zone recognition besides providing good contacts, Baker said.

Agency Executive Director Bruce McLean “has helped me on several occasions.”

“He has steered me in the right direction and kept his hand on the backs of the people who were trying to work with me. He would push me a little bit, too, to ensure follow-up,” Baker said. “He won’t do it for you, but he will do it with you.”

Baker and Federico hope the company’s grant and Pine Tree Zone status will help it to continue to grow. The company’s sales distributor, Blackwell Sales of Madison, has contacts throughout the state. Clean Woods also has sales coverage in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Alaska, Pennsylvania and Canada, Baker said.

They also hope to work with other area sawmills and woodchip mills to build more boilers that burn sawdust and wood chips. More boilers are being designed, Baker said.

“We have a lot of ideas,” Baker said. “We are just getting started.”