Project story · Colony · Manitoba
Sturgeon Creek Colony
One 15 million BTU wood chip plant heats the colony’s hog barns, poultry barns, greenhouse, shops and homes. It replaced natural gas in 2025.
Location
Manitoba
Heats
Hog and poultry barns, greenhouse, shops, homes
System
SCW boiler
15 million BTU/h (4,396 kW)
Fuel
Wood chips
Replaced
Natural gas
Installed
2025
Heating cost
About 50% lower
The job
Sturgeon Creek Colony heats a lot of buildings: hog barns, poultry barns, a greenhouse, shops and homes.
Until 2025 that was natural gas. Now one central wood chip plant does the job.
Install day, September 2025.
Chips are dumped and stored indoors.
Fuel handling
Trucks back into the fuel building and dump inside, out of the weather. A loader pushes the chips onto a walking floor, which moves them to the augers that carry fuel to the boiler.
A metering screw feeds only as much fuel as the heat load calls for.
The plant is laid out so a second boiler can be added later, fed from the same walking floor.
Remote monitoring
The controls trim the air to the oxygen reading on their own. They send a text when something needs attention, like an alarm or an ash bin that is nearly full.
We see the same screens from our shop in Headingley.
Multi-cyclone dust collector on the boiler exhaust.
“The chips go in the fuel building and the system does the rest. We check the screen, take deliveries and empty the ash bin. Our heating bill is about half what we paid for gas.”
Sturgeon Creek Colony, Manitoba
The result
Heating cost is about 50% lower than natural gas, with room to add a second boiler as the colony grows.
Full disclosure: Sturgeon Creek Colony owns SCW. The same people who build these boilers run this one every day, and the control program is written in-house by the person who runs it.
The boiler building on a December morning.
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