FARMINGTON – A $745 oil bill covering just a 30-day period was the last straw for landlord Richard Marble.

Raising his tenants’ rent didn’t seem like the right answer. They’re struggling with the economy, too, he said. So he started a search for a cheaper way to heat his apartments.

That search led him to small pellets, no larger than many vitamins, and a new boiler that can use either pellets or corn, he said Thursday. The pellets generally are made of recycled wood waste.

Marble believes he is the first landlord in the area to convert the heating for an apartment building over to a pellet boiler to provide heat and hot-water needs, he said. His second apartment building, adjacent to the first one on Holley Road, remains on an LP-gas system, at least for now.

Marble, a building inspector for the state, expects to use approximately five to six tons of pellets a year, with his oil burner providing hot water during the summer months.

He chose the pellet boiler because it’s clean, low maintenance and an automatic method, he said. It runs similar to an oil burner with heat produced as needed. When no heat is needed, the boiler is in a stand-by mode that maintains the boiler temperature, he explained. The pellet fuel burns cleanly with some weekly maintenance needed, but Marble’s expecting that to take less than a half hour a week.

Others are following Marble’s lead, voters at the annual town meeting in Phillips on Saturday approved spending $20,000 to buy a wood-pellet furnace and silo for the Public Works building, which houses the Phillips Fire Department, ambulance and town Highway Department.

For homeowner Dana Littlefield of Freeman, who installed the same type of boiler in his 2,200-square-foot home in November, the boiler is easy enough for his 13-year-old daughter to maintain, he said Thursday.

Littlefield heats his home, floors, water and a three-bay garage with “a nice hot heat.” The boiler requires about 10 minutes work a day and half an hour on weekends, Littlefield said.

Marble invested $6,900 to purchase his boiler plus installation, but compared that to the $4,900 he spent last year (at last year’s prices) for fuel and LP gas, he said.

A pellet boiler owner can expect to save approximately 40 percent over heating oil, said Mark Norwood of Evergreen Heat in Old Orchard who sold the boiler to Marble.

While pellet prices are running between $210 to $250 per ton, Norwood said, two tons of pellets is about the equivalent of one tank of heating oil. Tons of pellets, even with demand for them rising, represent a savings over filling a 250-gallon oil tank at a rate of $3.50 per gallon, he said.

Norwood anticipates bulk delivery of pellets soon being available.

“Instead of an oil tank pulling into your driveway, a grain truck will come and deliver three to four tons to a bin or silo in your basement,” he said.

“The days of cheap oil are over … we’ll still use it as a backup … but it will be like eating lobster … once in awhile and during the summer,” he said.

Locally, Harmon pellet stoves and boilers produced in Pennsylvania are available at Northern Lights.

The Pinnacle boilers are priced around $10,000 installed, but owners can expect a three- to four-year return on their investment, Norwood said.

“It won’t be a mass exit from oil, but one by one people will realize they can save themselves money and improve the future for their kids,” he said.

While the processed fuel pellets burn clean, a plus for the environment, Marble and Norwood both see pellet use as an economic boost for the state’s economy.

Keeping fuel dollars in Maine rather than sending them overseas is important, Marble said.

“If we all take that money (being sent overseas to buy oil) and spent it for fuel produced in Maine, we would be putting billions of dollars into our local economy and that would benefit everybody,” Marble said.