Wood Pellet Stoves to fight the current Financial Crisis?

Wood pellet Stoves and Boilers use locally available fuels, the Biomass. The financial crisis is on and soon the price of imported fuels, particularly petroleum product price is going to be sky high. Well, as it is globally the Petroleum crude price is at an all time high just after the lapse of past two year’s uneasy serenity. The current European Brent Crude Futures is a terrifying US$ 91.58 per barrel and on the other side of the Pacific West Texas Intermediate peaked at US$ 89.35. These are the highest clearing since October 2008. For Ireland even without the peaking, the financial crisis would bring about a near disaster as over 90% of its fuel is imported anyway.

Get ready for a shocker. True the he petroleum prices rallied to some extent since 2008 but it is still at least 40% more than what it was before the crisis of 2008! Soon, the financial experts say, we will find the crude barrel at US $ 100.Will the Irish survive this?

Winter is on us!
This winter is globally the harshest that occurred for a long time. Is this evidence of climate change due to our callous disregard for the environment? What ever it may be, right now the winter is sneering at the Irish. “What have you been doing last so many months?” seems to be the question it’s asking.

Almost everyone knows there are only two answers to the question of fuel poverty which is likely to hit many of us soon. Either find petroleum locally right now (an impossibility) or in the alternative, change over to renewable energy sources. The latter is surprisingly nothing new and SEAI has been helping people to make this change over, during the past years. Using Biomass fuel for home heating is the easiest and oldest time tested method. Wood Pellet burning stoves are the current favourite in this regard in Europe.

How different are the Wood Pellet Stoves?
The wood burning stove is dependent on the natural “chimney draft principle” where as a pellet stove must use specially sealed exhaust pipe to prevent gases of combustion leaking to indoor conditioned space due to the increased pressure created by the electric blower. In general the pellet burning stove would consist of certified double walled exhaust vent which is about 75 mm to 100 mm, where the inner wall is stainless steel and the outer construction is of galvanised steel.

The availability of an electric blower do away with the necessity for the vent to be rising vertically up. Few bends and crooks in a horizontal vent pipe is quite acceptable. Only if you you have frequent power failures, it may be necessary to have 1.5 to 2 m vertical run of the exhaust vent to induce some natural draught.

Another convenience is the ability to run the vent pipe horizontal and terminate below roof line, if there is no chimney. If a chimney is available the manufacturers’ recommendation is to run a correctly sized and fabricated stainless steel vent up through it to top.

Wood Pellet Stove components
The following are the major parts of a wood pellet stove.

• An Auger
• A Hopper and associated components
• One electrically driven Combustion Fan and one Convection Fan
• A ceramic fibre lined Fire Box –which in reality consists of a burn-pot and a system to collect ash left over after the combustion of the fuel.
• Safety devices such as heat sensors and vacuum switches etc.
• A control panel

As evident from above the pellet stove requires a few watts of electricity to drive the blowers and auger. This is easily offset by the savings and the environmental benefits derived by the use of biomass fuel which is mostly a waste product based.

Available SEAI Grants
Incidentally the following grants are availble when you invest in a Biomass burning home heating device

• Biomass Boiler - Euro 2,500
• Biomass Stove – Euro 800
• Biomass stove with integral back boiler – Euro 1,400