Orford — The Nichols family and Lyme are practically synonymous. Guy Nichols moved here in 1938 to cut timber and stayed to open Nichols Hardware, which the family ran for three generations. The Nichols’ cut-your-own Christmas tree farm on Route 10 is a holiday tradition for families from all over the Upper Valley and beyond.

So when Guy Nichols’ grandson, Scott Nichols, relocated his home and commercial heating wood-fuel boiler business from Lyme to Orford, the move immediately stirred suspicions. Rumors circulated that the move signaled the business was in trouble.

“I suppose it’s because the Nichols family has been identified with Lyme for so long that people were wondering something must have happened” with his business, Nichols surmises, attributing the dark hints to “scuttlebutt.”

Nichols took to the internet to set the record straight, posting on Upper Valley town listservs the reasons for moving his Tarm Biomass seven miles north — he had the opportunity to buy a tenant income-generating 32,000-square-foot building off Route 10 that also could better accommodate his business, along with clearer cell phone service and faster internet.

“(W)e did not leave for any reason other than the desire to own a better building for Tarm Biomass users,” Nichols wrote. “Contrary to what I’ve heard, we did not move Tarm Biomass to Orford to die a slow death.”

To be sure, the urgency to switch to wood-fuel heating has cooled in recent years.

The price of fuel oil and propane is down 50 percent from their 2014 peaks, thanks to the explosion in new deposit discoveries and fracking.

Climate change appears to be making for milder winters, too, making it less costly to heat homes and relieving pressure to invest $20,000 (before tax credits) in a wood-fuel boiler.

“With oil as low as it is, the incentive (to switch to wood-fuel) has definitely decreased,” Nichols acknowledged during an interview at the company’s new offices on Archertown Road across from the Orford Village Cemetery. “There is a direct correlation.”

But demand hasn’t evaporated, Nichols said, and people and institutions who invest in converting to a wood-fuel (logs, chips or pellets) boiler heating system have their eye on the long term and supporting the local economy by buying from regional wood-fuel suppliers. Tarm Biomass is behind the wood boiler installations at the Lyme School, Stevens High School, Mascoma Valley Regional High School, the Putney School in Putney, Vt., and Whelen Engineering in Charlestown.

“There’s something like $1 billion leaving New Hampshire to buy heating oil, $600 million in Vermont,” he said. “You can imagine what that does to the economy by keeping some of that in-state.”

Nichols’ Tarm Biomass is something of a misnomer: The company is phasing out as a distributor of the Denmark-made HS Tarm Co. wood boilers but will remain the exclusive U.S. distributor of Austria-based Froling Energy’s boilers, along with those of another line with which he is negotiating. Nichols said he hasn’t been as happy with the Tarm boilers since the company was acquired by a large multinational and shifted manufacturing to Turkey.

Nonetheless, Nichols said, he doesn’t foresee changing his company’s name despite the fact it won’t be carrying Tarm boilers since the rebranding may cause more confusion among longtime customers.

All Froling boilers sold in the U.S. go through Nichol’s seven-employee company, which is the exclusive domestic importer. The bulk of Tarm Biomass’ business is selling the wood-fuel boilers to a regular network of 20 local distributors and installers around the country.

In the Upper Valley, Nichols said, he has installed “several hundred” wood-fuel boiler systems at residences and businesses, with the figure jumping to “several thousand” throughout New England. He estimates the Upper Valley residential installations account for the equivalent of 10,000 gallons in heating oil savings annually.

Tarm Biomass evolved out of the Nichols’ family hardware business. The store, in addition to the usual hardware supplies, also had carved out a niche as one of the leading sellers of wood stoves and hearth equipment in the Twin States and wood-boilers were a “natural progression and fit” of that business. When the hardware store closed in 2005, Nichols continued the boiler business at the same location. Then, in 2007, he relocated it to a rental space on Britton Lane.

Although the building’s owners were responsive to the company’s needs, its split-level structure made warehousing difficult, Nichols said, by requiring the refrigerator-size boilers to be loaded onto a truck and driven around to the other side of the building simply to move them from one room to another.

“One of the key reasons for moving was that I was looking for a place to own,” Nichols said, along with a single-floor layout that would simplify warehousing of products, equipment and supplies. When the opportunity to purchase the building that once housed late New Hampshire Gov. Meldrim Thomson Jr.’s printing business became available, Nichols and his wife, Heidi Nichols, snapped it up for $590,000.

The building, which can be seen from Route 10, has two tenants: the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Dartmouth Printing Co., which utilizes it for storage. The building has even been visited by a future U.S. president. Nichols said GOP candidate Ronald Reagan met with Thomson there in 1979 when Reagan was campaigning in New Hampshire for the Republican nomination. A display in the USDA office commemorates the occasion.

Still, there is one aspect about the company’s new building that is like the cobbler’s children going without shoes: The heating system relies on traditional fossil fuels. Nichols acknowledges the irony but said it’s simply a matter of time to get the conversion work done.

“Unfortunately, when you’re in the heating business, doing work for yourself during the height of the heating season is not so easy,” he said.

John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.]]>