Pellet Burners are a cost effective way of heating those vital rooms during the cold winter.
Italians use pellet stoves in the harsh freezing cold winters of Tuscany. For three months of the year, it’s so cold that they will close up most of the house. Families and pets will cuddle up and live out of just the kitchen and maybe one other room to save the huge costs of heating.
Here in the UK gas is horrifically expensive. Wood is too. But pellets are not so bad – tiny little rabbit dropping shaped nuggets of inexpensive sawdust and forestry sweepings. It’s a brilliant idea and one that we in the UK are slowly starting to take up. We think that our gas is expensive but it’s not a chink of what the italians have to pay for theirs. Installing a wood pellet stove in northern Italy is a no-brainer. Over here it’s starting to be too. There are now more and more factories that produce pellets so that the right – high heat, less waste – pellets are more widely available and lots of suppliers are selling the pellet burners too. There’s even a government environmental grant scheme for the bigger users which has meant that more suppliers are willing to take the jump into producing the pellets. Good news for all of us!
As the prices of gas increase in the UK it’s no wonder that sales of these pellet stoves are really starting to take off. The average price you paid for electricity in 2004 was probably between £250 and £500 depending on the size of your home. In 2014 it was between £750 and £1500 and even more today 3 or 4 years later. That’s a huge increase. The prices for electricity have risen in line aswell.
In energy terms the mains gas delivered to your home is a tiny bit cheaper than pellets.
That is provided that you are getting a good deal from your gas supplier. See this great site for energy comparison details between wood, lpg gas, pellets, heating oil and mains gas: it basically shows that pellets are much more efficient at heating than wood and provide cheaper energy than heating oil too; and that mains gas is a tiny bit cheaper.
http://www.forestfuels.co.uk/about-wood-fuel/fuel-price-comparisons
By the time you’ve heated the whole house, lost a lot of heat to waste in the unused corridors and rooms pellets rather than gas or electricity is probably a really good solution. The real benefits to saving money are in the behaviour changes and the habits that you’ll break.
It’s too easy to just put on the central heating to automatically start and finish at the same times every day. It’s easy to forget to turn off the radiators in the rooms and corridors that you’re not using. And it’s difficult to regulate when the thermostat is in a different room to the one that you want to keep warm. Don’t even start with the interest and excesses when you miss a payment.
With a pellet burner, well, it’s either not hot enough – go put some more pellets on – or it is nice and cosy and warm. Simple. Cost efficient. Only spend what you want to spend. Perfect – you choose! It’ll probably end up cheaper and you’ll be helping to save the polar bears too!
They come in all shapes and sizes.
Pellet burners can be free standing or installed in say an old fireplace. You need to put the pellets in somewhere (the hopper) and this hopper can be in all sorts of different places depending on the design. And the exhaust needs to go somewhere – either up the chimney or out through the wall. Usually it’s out through the wall. It’s not necessarily expensive to install – it’s not like gas. It’s just a stove. At up to half less than a year’s gas or electricity bill they’re not generally expensive in themselves either.
Dirt cheap fuel.
Fuel pellets are quite cheap. A bag can last a day or two if you’re careful, depending on how long you’re burning for and at what heat. And you can get nearly a hundred bags of pellets for two or three hundred pounds. In other words 100 or so days – that’s basically the whole winter – plus the stove itself for not much more than you’d have paid in heating anyway for a year or so. So generally could we say that it’d almost definitely have paid for itself over a couple or three years; after which you’ve got a bargain every year.
I hope you go further with your research into this and if you choose to install a burner, or even if not, come back and tell us how it all went.
References:
Energy price comparisons at forestfuels.co.uk
http://www.forestfuels.co.uk/about-wood-fuel/fuel-price-comparisons
The price increase of gas in the UK from ovoenergy.com
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/the-average-gas-bill-average-electricity-bill-compared.html
The regulation behind the government’s renewable energy scheme (The Renewable Heat Incentive) from ofgem.gov.uk
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/environmental-programmes/domestic-rhi
