Cedar is Fossil Fuel Free*!!

For the past two years, Cedar has not used any oil for heating, although oil burners still remained installed in the building. Last week, the final oil burning furnaces were removed, as well as all of the plumbing, a symbolic marker along the path to carbon neutrality at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center.

Cedar has been heated by the central heating system–fueled by wood, solar hot water, and waste heat from the snow making generator–but until last week, the three oil burning furnaces still were hooked up, such that they could be turned on as back up (although they never were). Two pipes fed Cedar’s heat system, one from the central heating system, and one from the oil furnaces, with a valve that recently has remained turned off. Now without the oil furnaces, all of the distribution remains the same, just without that input to the system.

Last week, Eric, Lucas, and Ethan pulled all of this out,  leaving an empty room in the basement that used to be devoted to the oil heat operation. The plumbing will be given away, and some of the tanks will be repurposed for solar hot water at Elinor’s House.

“The grey thing in the front is one of three big oil burners that provided the heat and hot water for Cedar. The round tanks behind it were used to store heat from the oil furnaces, some of these tanks are what we will reuse for solar.”-Ethan

*When we make snow, we do use fossil fuels to run the generators. So by using waste heat from the generators, it does still have a slight “fossil trail”.

(Ethan contributed reporting and photo).