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Wood fuel is both an ecological and cost effective solution to heating your home, biomass fuel is produced from organic materials, either directly from plants or indirectly from other products. The majority of wood chip or wood pellets are made using waste products which would otherwise be discarded. Wood fuel boilers are just like a normal boiler, but are more ethically responsible.
How does it work?
By burning wood efficiently in a sophisticated boiler usually storing the energy in some form of thermal store (to reduce cycling of the boiler). With a log boiler it is manually loaded with wood at least once a day during the heating season and lit manually. With wood chip or wood pellet boilers the pellet/chip is loaded into the combustion chamber automatically and lit automatically by either a glow pencil or hot air blower. Then the boiler will run as long as there is a heat demand.
Different options
There are three forms of wood fuel -
Logs: The simplest example is burning logs in a stove as a room heater only. Log boilers and space heaters are used to generate larger volumes of energy for either central heating, hot water or space heating. Commonly, wood burning stoves heat one or several rooms, while dedicated log boilers will provide full house heating even in large properties.
Pellet Burning stoves and boilers can offer the similar level of control as oil and gas appliances. This is because unlike logs, heat generated by wood pellets can be switched on and off relatively quickly. Pellet also has a higher energy density than log or wood chip so is more easily stored.
Burning wood chips normally occurs in a dedicated biomass boiler. I would only recommend wood chip systems for those clients that have the ability to store large quantities of wood chip and the handling equipment to move the wood chip around as you require three times the volume of storage than wood pellet.
Where to get pellets from
We are really fortunate in the North East of Scotland to have three pellet manufacturers on our doorstep. Puffin Pellets based at Boyndie on the Moray coast. Arbuthnott Wood Pellets based south of Aberdeen and Balcas have a factory a little further away at Invergordon.
I am often asked if the price of pellets will go up in price. My answer of course is yes, as fuel costs rise the delivery cost will increase and manufacturing costs will also increase with inflation; however we should also take into consideration that we currently have one of the cheapest pellet prices in Western Europe.
In combination with solar
Biomass boilers are perfect for winter time and as the season changes over to summer time the need for heating dissipates and energy requirements are for hot water only. To prevent the boiler cycling too much in the summer time, it is ideal to allow solar thermal panels to provide most of your hot water requirements. This not only gives you free hot water in the summer, but reduces the wear and tear on the boiler.
AD Heating in association with Freddie Simpson Joiners can supply an all-