PowerSwitch

[kirismith]

Does anyone have experience of living with a wood pellet boiler for their household heating and hot water? I'm really interested in switching my existing gas system to a wood pellet one and want to know the realities.
Cheers!

[kenneal - lagger]

A friend of mine imports pellets from Argentina.

Find a supplier before you find a stove. In fact if you find a supplier he will probably find you a stove. CAT have used wood pellet heaters and have a help line for this sort of information at

http://www.cat.org.uk/information/info_content.tmpl

and welcome to Powerswitch.
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BLOG

It is very, very, very serious indeed. This is the big one!" Professor Tim Lang, APPGOPO, 25/03/08. And he was talking about food, not oil or the economy!

[mikepepler]

And if you find a reliable (local) supply of pellets, the next thing is to make sure your pellet stove will still work when the grid is down - I think most of them need some electricity, though I know some also have a 12V input ready to use...
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Mike

"Deal with reality or reality will deal with you"
Dr Colin Campbell

http://peplers.blogspot.com
http://peakoilupdate.blogspot.com

[snow hope]

My only concern is that there are not many wood pellet suppliers and wood pellets require quite a bit of energy intensive processing to produce...... you can't make them yourself.....
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The economic expansion was driven by financial capital as banks lent more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow’s Economic Growth was collateral for To-day’s Debt. Dr. Colin Campbell.
And that was the fatal mistake. Me

[kenneal - lagger]

I, also, would be concerned about the long term sustainability of supply of wood pellets. The boilers aren't cheap and are relatively complex so maintenance could also be a problem. Personally, I would prefer a log stove. There are boilers available now that can be stacked with a days, or at least several hours, supply and that burn efficiently with a down draft so only the bottom of the heap burns.

I'm trying out various jet fire stoves that will be used for the cooking at the Gathering. I'm going to build one to help heat the water for our new composting loo/shower block but the showers won't, unfortunately, be ready in time for the Gathering although the loos will. We'll all have to smell natural together. The idea would be to uprate the design to do our central heating when our present stove reaches the end of its life.

For Jet fires see http://www.aprovecho.org/
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BLOG

It is very, very, very serious indeed. This is the big one!" Professor Tim Lang, APPGOPO, 25/03/08. And he was talking about food, not oil or the economy!

[emordnilap]

An 'eco' shop I was in had one and it seemed clean, safe and efficient. Lots of buts, though.

My worries would be the technology involved - if you're going for pellets because you think they're somehow 'greener' than other fuels, I'd want the technology to last 25 years with minimal maintenance. Can't see that somehow.

Plus, how energy-intensive is pellet making? Again, the machinery used: would it last 25 years?

Thirdly, when the grid's down you're in trouble unless you have some off-grid kit to run it. I suspect 99.9% of owners would not.

Overall, it seems that the 'green-ness' is over-inflated - it's a toy which would appeal to the owners of spotless FUVs.
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The human appears to have no idea what its ideal diet should be; has self-inflicted diet-related diseases; causes extensive environmental destruction through basic food production & creates pathogenic infestations that widely infect its food supply.

[Mark]

From the Envirolink NW website:

Biomass Fuel Supply in England’s Northwest

It is often said that one of the barriers preventing the greater use of modern biomass systems is security of fuel supply.

Within the Northwest of England this is simply not the case. It has the best woodchip supply chain in the country developed from an industry which supplies reprocessed woodchip to wood panel manufacturing plants. They deal in over 2 million tonnes annually. The Northwest is now the major biomass fuel supplier to other region’s of the UK. Where problems do occur it is often providing smaller amounts on an irregular basis. Even here, there is a rapidly expanding sector of small and medium sized businesses supplying local markets. No matter where you are in the Northwest you can obtain pellets in small bags on a pallet delivered to your door.

While this leaflet principally concerns the supply of woody biomass, other solid biomass fuels such as olive stone waste, palm oil expeller and other agricultural residuals are used as biomass fuels. These are easily imported in large quantities via the region’s ports.

Link to the leaflet:
http://www.envirolinknorthwest.co.uk/Envirolink/Library0.nsf/039e7b59c07eb15c80256d4f0042987f/96c1e87876b64c98802572ec004dfc9f?OpenDocument

It gives useful supplier contacts for those of us in the sunny NW.
Thought it might be useful for people in other areas as well ?

[adam2]

I would avoid pellet fired boilers for the reasons already given re cost complexity and reliance on external suppliers of parts and fuel, and remember that those suppliers are almost certainly grid reliant.

A log burning boiler or stove can generaly also burn coal, generally with the addition of a grate.

The ability to burn coal for a few years could be very valuable indeed, every month in which coal is burnt is another months worth of wood not used, and therefore still available for the future.
If you have healthy trees on your land, burning coal for a year or two would allow the trees to grow a bit more, and actually increase the firewood available in the future.
(any dead, dying, rotten or diseased trees should of course be cut ASAP)
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"Installers and owners of emergency diesels must assume that they will have to run for a week or more"

[Mark S]

My company recently tendered for a bio mass woodchip boiler for Kent County Council.Good project but we didnt win it.The KCC are booked to fit 11 biomass boilers over the next 5 years. There is a wood pellet supplier in Sussex we got prices from, i will find his details.
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The future is in our hands

[emordnilap]

I agree with adam2.

I'm doing a brochure for a pellet stove company at the moment. The mechanicals in it would frighten you; it needs a constant source of power; there are so many caveats you'd be a fool to buy one, but that's the small print; the pellets themselves must have a very high embodied energy; the brochure is telling for what it doesn't tell you. I am complicit in furthering this con. There again, I print stuff for gun clubs too. I'm between a rock and a hard place and a brick wall feeling as hypocritical as the rest of you should, though not as much as the governments that give grants for them.

They're gadgets, these pellet stoves, that's all. Like Nigerian scams, there are plenty out there who will fall for it. But that's all they are - stupid, unendurable fads which will endure just that bit too long.
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The human appears to have no idea what its ideal diet should be; has self-inflicted diet-related diseases; causes extensive environmental destruction through basic food production & creates pathogenic infestations that widely infect its food supply.

[Joules]

[snow hope]

[JohnB]

Here's a couple of pics of a cutaway Ökofen pellet boiler.

What I haven't got a photo off is the stuff related to the auger feed, and electronics. It's an impressive piece of kit, but is pretty complex, and without mains electricity, it's useless. In a BAU world, when you can call out an engineer if it goes wrong, it's fine, and probably no more complex than any other boiler, although there are very few heating engineers who would know how to fix it. I wouldn't like to rely on one in an uncertain future world though.
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John

Eco-Hamlets UK - Small sustainable neighbourhoods
Permaculture UK Forum

[kenneal - lagger]

[emordnilap]