Wood Pellet Heating And Pellet Benefits

Using wood as a fuel for heating solutions is nothing new, however using wood in pellet form for heating solutions has only really existed on commercial scale since the beginning of the 21st century. Basic log stoves and boilers have always been a division of home and business heating solutions. However they have never really gained mass market appeal in the modern world. The obvious reasons for this is that they are very labour intensive, they are not very fuel efficient, the fuel is not always locally available and log transportation over longer distances is not economically viable or sustainable. Therefore the only people who have used log heating solutions are those either have access to their own or a local supply of seasoned timber. The other issues are the logs generally sold are not seasoned down to the 30% required to achieve a satisfactory burn with limited smoke. However many of the wood log traders sell the fuel at prices which would not indicate that it contained between 40-50% moisture. The other major disadvantage is the volume of space that is required to store the timber. This therefore means the wood log heating market will never grow into a serious market contender in the 21st century. However pellets do offer a practical heating solution which can compete with other heating units.

The principle of wood pellet fuel has actually existed since the 1970's. Animal feed mill processors were experimenting with using wood in the feed mills. Though the machine is not ideal to produce wood pellets, they did produce the first wood pellet fuel, and a few wood pellet fuel manufactures and pellet stove manufactures did enter the market. However at the time there was no real market share for the wood pellet. Wood pellets are more expensive than wood logs, and the benefits were not well known. Though they had much lower maintenance than burning logs, they still required more maintenance than oil or gas heating solutions. At that time the price of oil and gas was cheap, there we no concern over fuel supply and no one was aware of climate change and carbon emissions. The wood pellet market never really go going until the beginning of the 21st century, when the prices of oil and gas began to rise and concern over climate change was been started to be taken seriously. Sweden was well ahead of the rest of the world with wood pellet fuels, and had proved the principle of the fuel and pellet stoves and pellet boilers.

Wood Pellets Stove and Pellet Boilers

The characteristics of wood pellet fuel is a uniform shape and size. These qualities mean wood pellets are ideal for automatic feeding systems with auger units. Wood pellet stoves and boiler have an integrate hopper which can hold at least a days worth of fuel. The burner is controller by computer which monitors the fire and feeds in the required amount of pellets to maintain the desired temperature. As most pellet burners also have hot rod igniters they can ignite the pellets as well, so the pellet stove or boiler can turn its self on, on demand and turn its self off by cutting off air flow to the fire. Wood pellets have a much higher density than wood logs and also a much lower moisture content below 10%. This means the pellets generate less ash and less smoke, requiring less maintenance. Premium wood pellets produce only 0.5% ash.

PelHeat Wood Pellet Production Guide

At PelHeat we have many years of experience in pellet production, and we provide a pellet production consultation service. The PelHeat guide download will show you how to make wood and other fuel pellets.

 The Wood Pellet Production Guide © PelHeat Ltd - Wood Pellet Heating