On a cold morning earlier this month, I walked into Penns Valley Area School District’s new biomass building.

“Welcome to the space program,” physical plant director Bob Miller told me.

He had to raise his voice, to be heard over the sound of machines burning several tons of wood chips and turning them into heat for the district’s elementary and high school buildings.

Miller’s space program reference was a joke. But the building has the high-tech devices and the large ceiling reminiscent of NASA.

The district will host an open house at the biomass building from 2 to 7 p.m. Friday. It’s located along state Route 45 in Penn Township, next to Penns Valley Elementary and Intermediate School.

The biomass heating system, which started burning wood chips in December, has been years in the making. The total cost of the project was $3.3 million, but the district’s direct expenses were $1.64 million. The rest came from grants.

The biomass boiler is expected to cut the district’s use of oil for the high school and elementary school building from 71,000 gallons a year to 10,000 gallons.

How much that will save the district varies based on oil prices. When district leaders planned the project, they estimated oil would cost $2.29 a gallon.

“We put that in to be conservative,” said Superintendent Brian Griffith.

But oil prices have increased to $3.35 a gallon.

“Our payback is quicker,” said Griffith.

He’s now estimating the system will pay for itself in less than seven years.

The system uses wood chips that typically cost $45 a ton. But the district got about 310 tons relatively cheap this summer, when it hired Metzler Forest Products to make wood chips from dead and diseased trees on school property.

The system uses about 60 tons of wood chips a week, and steam often rises from the building on cold mornings.

“A lot of people in the morning think there’s smoke coming out of the stack. You really never see smoke,” said Miller. “The only time you see smoke is the initial fire-up and sometimes whenever it goes into pilot mode, which means it dies everything down to where everything’s satisfied. And then when it ramps up you’ll get just a hint of smoke — not what you actually get when you start the unit.”

Inside, a touch-screen computer keeps track of the process.

“Let’s see,” Griffith said, as he scrolled through the menus. “The internal temperature in the firebox is 1,084 (degrees). The temperature in the secondary combustion chamber is just shy of 1,000 degrees.”

Griffith doesn’t see the biomass system as only a cost saver, but as an educational tool. He plans for students to study how it works, and the environmental and cost benefits.

“We’re going to be looking at our ag departments, our science departments to see how we can integrate some of this into our curriculum,” he said.

Ed Mahon writes about news from the Penns and Brush Valley regions. He can be reached at 231- 4619 or emahon@centredaily.com.