why wood pellets?

Wood is an attractive fuel for many reasons. It is renewable, has low ash, is clean to burn, and cheap provided it isn’t moved a long way.

Raw wood and wood chips however have problems – they can be wet, difficult to handle, prone to spontaneous heating in storage, breed fungal spores, and contain extraneous material. Moving wood chips is expensive – half the weight of raw wood chips is water, and most of the volume is air.

Pellets are wood that has been cleaned, dried, and ground to a fine powder before being compressed in a die to make a small, regular, pellet.

Driving off the water increases the energy content, and compression increases the density – making wood pellets a much cheaper fuel to transport and store than raw wood or wood chips. Pellets have more than twice as much energy per tonne, and more than eight times as much energy per cubic metre as raw wood chips.

The small, regular and rounded shape makes handling easy and reliable – they never hang up in bins, or jam in feed augers.