Posted: October 25th, 2010 | Author: Killwillie67 | Filed under: Wood Pellets | No Comments »
It is just this easy
Sure when you make wood pellets they are renewable, made from wood waist and manufactured domestically, but do they save me money? The answer is maybe and maybe not. As one would expect that depend on the price paid for each. So the purpose of this article is not to give a simple yes or no answer but to equip the interested reader with the tools to figure it out. I will compare wood pellet to the 2 major sources of heating natural gas and heating oil. To complicate matters each of the 3 energy sources are sold by different units. Wood Pellets are sold by the ton (US tons for this article) Natural Gas is sold by the therm and Fuel Oil is sold by the gallon. The first thing to do is look-up the current prices for the products you want to compare. Looking at your bill plus some quick web searching should make this pretty easy so I won’t go into that here.
The next step is to convert the unit your product is sold by into a standard measure for energy in this case BTU which stands for British Thermal Unit. A Gallon of fuel oil contains 138,690 BTU. A Therm is actually defined as 100,000 BTU. A ton (2,000 pounds) of wood pellets contains 16,500,000 BTU. Now we have to normalize the BTU numbers, this just means we have to divide and multiply to get to the same number of BTU for each product. The equation is as follows [price per unit] divided by [BTU per unit] multiplied by [1 million] to get [price per million BTU] which is what we want because now we can compare on to the other by simply looking at the price per Million-BTU. Her goes some examples. If natural gas costs $1.23 per therm then [1.23/100,000] x 1,000,000 = $12.30 for 1 million BTU of natural gas. If fuel oil cost $2.36 per gallon then [2.36/138,690] x 1,000,000 = $17.02 for 1 million-BTU. If wood pellets cost $200 per ton then [200/16,500,000] x 1,000,000 = $12.12 for 1 million-BTU. We all know price vary and all fuel will cost more in the winter when most needed. Wood Pellet have a distinct advantage that it can be easily bought in the summer and stored until needed.
This is just a dollars and cents analysis of the cost assuming you have a choice to purchasing different types of fuels. As you can see wood pellets are price competitive with the other energy sources when bought at retail. The real advantages of wood pellets are that they are a domestic product and a renewable energy source. If the bottom line is still your bottom line then you can make your own wood pellets, just click the link above to get a free report.
Posted: September 17th, 2010 | Author: Killwillie67 | Filed under: Wood Pellets | No Comments »
A handful of residential wood pellets
A better description might be “wood fuel pellets”. Wood pellets are a type of wood fuel, generally made from waste wood either compacted sawdust produced as a byproduct of saw-milling or grinding wood chips produced from logging operations. The pellets are extremely dense and can be produced with a low moisture content (lower than 10%) that allows them to burn at a very high combustion efficiency. Efficiency in the wood pellet industry refers to both energy contained within a given weight and the percentage of the pellet that remains as ash after combustion. Another feature is their consistent and small size allowing easy automatic feeding with very good control. They can be fed to a burner by an auger feed system or by a pneumatic conveying system. The high density of wood pellets also permits convenient handling, efficient storage and easy transport over long distance. They can be loaded by blowing, belt conveyor. Movement of wood pellets from a tanker to a storage bunker or silo on a customer’s premises is easily accomplished. Wood pellets stack and flow in a manner very similar to corn allowing corn handling technology and infrastructure to be used without modification.
As the price of heating with fossil fuels increases, more capacity for pellet heating is being installed. A large number of models of pellet stoves, forced hot air heating furnaces and wood petted burning boilers have been developed and marketed since about 1999. With the surge in the price of fossil fuels in 2005, the demand has increased all over Europe and a sizable industry is emerging. Wood pellet demand in the United States and Canada is currently limited to the northeast and rural areas where utility natural gas is not available. In addition to the obvious use of home heating wood pellets can be used for air conditioning and refrigeration by employing absorption coolers. Absorption coolers work by using salts and a liquid to create chemical cooling, absorbing heat into the liquid and then use heat from wood pellets to separate the salts and liquid again, in a recovery cycle.
Wood pellets are produced by first drying any green wood, then pulping the wood by passed it through a hammer mill to provide a uniform dough-like mass. This pulp is then fed into a press where it is squeezed through a die having holes of the required size normally 6 mm in diameter for residential use, or 9 mm or larger for industrial or institutional use. The high pressure of the press causes the temperature of the wood to increase greatly, and the lignin reactivates slightly forming a natural ‘glue’ that holds the pellet together as it cools, similar to how the wood held together in its naturally state.