Smart Options are proud to be a designer and supplier to Charles I.F.E. Berrybank Farm is owned by the family company Charles I.F.E and has been established for more than 40 years. They have been producing electricity from bio gas for more than 20 years by collecting the effluent from pigs to generate electricity to use on their farm. 

Heat is a bi product of bio gas, with power costs rising, creating ways to use this heat is a way for businesses to make significant savings

Most of the of energy created per day is being used on the farm with the excess being fed back into the grid.

The electricity generation occurs by combusting the gas in a generator (gensets).  Some of the heat from the generators is used to maintain the temperature in the biodigester. 

Smart Options have now fitted the gensets  with exhaust heat exchangers and temperature control systems which capture the wasted energy to supplement the heat to the biodigester and replace the 492 heat lamps @175watts each in the piggery with thermal heat pads in the farrowing pens.

In the winter months the surplus heat will be used to replace the electricity used to run the heat lamps a saving of 100kwh per hour,and during the summer the surplus heat will be used to run an absorption chiller

 Smart Options next project will be to facilitate the installation of an absorption chiller to convert excess heat in the summer months to cool the farrowing pens. Another use for this maybe to deliver cool air into the grain silos which will ensure that the temperature remains under 17deg C to inhibit weevil infestations.

So far the installation of the first phase of this project has improved the energy production of this system by 1 Megawatt  of extra power per day

Congratulations to Charles I.F.E for their innovative, forward thinking and environmentally sustainable farming.

Smart Options are currently developing a skill base and product to look at the opportunities that arise from sequencing CO2 from algae and using waste product to produce bio fuel.

Working with Swinburne Institute of Technology, we have been able to utilise the skills of three talented final year mechanical engineering students, Sam Rickard, Dale Sinclair and Tim Barry to research the viability of using generator exhaust gas and pig effluent to enhance the growth of micro algae which can be used as a renewable energy source of bio diesel.

The students have recently been awarded the prestigious Rex Gotch Award for their endeavours. Well done Sam, Dale and Tim.