Dare to give a fig: upgraded boiler system saves time and money for Valley Fig Growers.(Field Reports)

Food Engineering, April, 2004

WOULD $16,000 MAKE YOU SMILE? IT BROUGHT A broad smile to Michael Emigh's face. As president of Valley Fig Growers, a grower-owned marketing cooperative in Fresno, CA, Emigh received the rebate check from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) for the energy efficiency achieved by upgrading Valley Fig's boiler system.

The old system, a 300 BHP firetube boiler, could not be used to its full capacity due to California's strict limitations on the amount of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) that gas-fired boilers can emit. "We would have had plenty of capacity if we could have used the boiler's full potential," says Roy Ziegenfuss, Valley Fig Growers' maintenance superintendent, "but then we would have been in violation of the local smog laws. We had to derate our old boiler down...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.