What Are Wood Fireplace Pellets?
Wood fireplace pellets are small pellets made of compressed wood chips and saw dust that is a by product of other more lucrative wood processing. The chips and saw dust are dried to a specified moisture content, then compressed by a very high pressure machine. They are compressed with so much pressure that no binding agent is required other than the sap from the timber itself.
The benefits of wood pellets are as follows:
- Ease of transport
- Clean burning fuel
- It complies to consistent standards. (Things which have standard sizes, shaped and moisture content can easily be designed for)
Pellets can be purchase by the bag for hand loading or by the truckload if you have a system that is set up for it.
When ordered by truckload the pellets are blown from a delivery truck up to 20 yards to a storage unit. In the past there has been a lot of hassle with dust, but this was largely due to the use of agricultural feed trucks being used to deliver the pellets. As dust is not really an issue for agriculture, they did not have dust minimisation technology, and it was a mess. If you use one of the large suppliers these days, there is little problem.
Understanding Wood Pellet Boilers And.. Combustion
Wood pellets can also be used to fuel a boiler. The pellets are fed into the “burner” where they are burned. The burner in all boilers does much the same job. It’s a place where the fuel is mixed with air to provide the optimal conditions for combustion, and lit. Before you know it the combustion gases are travelling through the heat exchanger where it heats up the water.
The flame from the burner, and the resultant combustion gases escape into the boiler, transferring their heat to the water circulating through the heat exchanger within the boiler. The heat is then distributed the house using a wet system. In most cases water flows through the heat exchanger in the boiler, absorbing heat from the flame and the combustion gases. This hot water is then circulated around the house to radiators, underfloor heaters and hot water cylinders.