August 13, 2024 Innasol Partner Profiles

Ross Donovan from Asgard Biomass

Ross Donovan founded Asgard Biomass Heating Systems in 2004. We spoke to Ross about his professional background, how and why he started working with boilers, and why he decided to devote his professional life to biomass heating systems.

Your degree was in engineering. How did you start out professionally?

In the early years I was a London Underground test engineer. After five or six years I joined a company in Biggleswade that made aircraft hangar, acoustic, and blast doors. It was obviously a specialist business, very niche, and I learned a lot there. I learned most of what I know there about business, not just the technical side.

What led you to boilers?

I’d spent ten years at that business, then a guy I knew from college was self-employed, and he was looking to make boilers. He’d seen lots of batch-fed boilers, like ones on farms, and he asked if I wanted to work with him, so we started an engineering consultancy. Meanwhile, I was still working my day job.

Around 1994 or 1995 the Landfill Tax and the Packaging Waste Directive were coming in. Companies were about to have to pay to dispose of their waste. We were speaking to Silver Spoon in Bury St Edmunds, and they were producing a lot of packaging waste — lots of bags and cardboard. We thought, ‘What if that waste could become fuel? Businesses produce it anyway, and they have to pay to get rid of it, so why not save fuel costs and disposal costs?’

They gave us the job to install a 300kw boiler to provide space heating and hot water at the site. We brought in a shell boiler, and we created a system so people could shred the waste, that would feed a silo, and that would feed the boiler. We sold it for £50,000, but the trouble was it cost us £65,000 to get it to work. It wasn’t a great start, but I thought there was something there, and there was probably a market worth pursuing. My partner wanted out, but I carried on the business while still working full-time.

When did you start looking at biomass?

Paper and cardboard doesn’t travel well mechanically — they bung up screw mechanisms — so I’d built a boiler that burned paper and cardboard in bale form. It was a bit too ‘Heath Robinson’ to market, and I needed money to refine it. I found a financial backer and got a prototype developed in 2001 in my backers’ factory. They were naturally very keen to know that there wasn’t going to be any legislation that meant that the design wasn’t going to be allowed, in particular the Waste Incineration Directive (WID).

We asked for advice on that, and we were told that our 300kw boiler was too small to be covered by the WID, so we were fine. It turns out that was bad advice and there was a very long dispute over that. In the end, my backers had enough and wound up the business in 2004.

I had six children and a bloody great mortgage, and I set up Asgard. I was contacted by a Swedish, company, that manufactured specialised flue gas cleaning equipment. They were getting enquires from the UK, as a consequence of the WID, regarding their equipment. They asked if I could assist them in the UK with both marketing and installation. This I did and also at this time I was contacted by both Austrian and Danish biomass boiler manufacturers looking to access the UK market. I entered into a commercial relationship with these companies marketing and installing their boilers and become Asgard biomass.

Why ETA boilers?

I became aware of ETA around 2011 and once I started installing them, I dropped all others fairly quickly. I used to install a boiler and expect a call about a problem within a week, but when I install an ETA boiler I know it’s going to work.

I love them — they’re gorgeous bits of kit. Form follows function, too — they’re just wonderful. You don’t tend to encounter problems like a big wood chip jamming up the mechanism because they’re strong enough for that not to be an issue. If anything were too big for it to handle, it’d stop itself and tell you why.

They’re so user-friendly. You can use them remotely, so you could be hundreds of miles away and still operate them. Other boilers just pale into insignificance next to them — none has ever come anywhere near to an ETA boiler.

Innasol is a serious business with a serious purpose. When you’re on their training courses you actually work with the ETA boilers, and once you’ve become an installer you have help whenever you need it. It’s such a great company to work with.

Innasol is the UK’s sole distributor of ETA biomass boilers, the leading national brand for biomass heating systems with wood chip, wood pellet, or log fuel.

If you would like to find out about joining the Innasol partner network and becoming an accredited installer of ETA boilers and biomass heating systems, contact us to learn more. here.

If you want to remove fossil fuels from your heating and you’d like to find out if biomass boilers would be a fit for your home or business, read more here, or call 01621 892613 to speak to one of the accredited installers from our nationwide network.