Wood pellets are becoming a more popular fuel to heat with. Their main selling point is that they are cheap. They are cheap because they are made from waste products. If all sawmill waste was converted to fuel pellets, how many homes could be heated with them?
You occasionally hear about cars converted to using old cooking oil as fuel. I wonder the same thing: How much waste oil is really out there?
Is sawmill waste used to make blandex board?
According to the Wikiwood pellets are made from sawdust which is surprising since it can be used to make composite materials and burned to heat kilns at the mill. So there must be some excess of supply or dearth of demand for wood products if wood pellets are economical compared to pellets made from other agricultural waste products.
If my calculations are correct a little over 39 million homes could be heated if all sawmill waste from all the lumber produced in the US was converted to pellets. That might be off since lumber production is measured in board feet and pellets are measured in tons.
How did you come up with this number? I’m not questioning it but I’m really surprised. I thought the U.S was producing less lumber due to rising imports. I would’ve guessed that lumber mills found good uses or markets for sawdust since they’ve had to deal with it for a long time and I would’ve thought that they would try to minimize sawdust because the wood products are worth more than the dust. All together, I would never have guessed that sawdust wood pellets could cover a massive portion of the home heating needs in the U.S. This is astonishing.
A former co-worker of mine left our employer to become a wood pellet furnace and fuel dealer. It seemed weird at the time but maybe I was off base. I don’t know how he is doing now but I heard that he went back to regular work.
A lot depends upon your location and the type of wood waste you are going to turn into pellets.
Here in the Pacific NW most of the wood going through the sawmills is Douglas Fir or Sitka Spruce, both of which are completely unsuitable for wood pellet fuel. Well, it could be used as hog fuel for industrial power production, but not for home heating needs.
All of the chipped wood scraps from these lumber mills goes toward paper production, not pellets. Truck, after truck, after truck, of wood chips rollin’ down the highway toward your future butt wipe needs.
I have a pellet stove and enjoy it. I think had a half ton left from last year and paid $240 for one ton of pellets for this last winter and didn’t even use it all. Of course we work odd shifts and are not always home. I think it frosted the lawn only twice this year. “Thank you, global warming!”
And these pellets that I buy are hardwood pellets. Low in ash and pitch. Fir pellets would probably create enough build up in the chimney to cause a fire.
Cites: two sons working in lumber mills and the wife working in a paper mill.
Softwood pellets from pines and firs are the most desirable. Hardwood crates much more ash. More BTU’s in a 40# bag of fir than maple. That would be why the prices are structured the way they are. Pellets are my primary heating source until the subzero weather hits. I go through 4-5 tons per year.
Remember hearing about what was usually left in the forest, basically smaller branches of the cut down trees are now, thanks to wood pellet stoves, taken also and not left behind to decay on the forest floor. This seemed to be causing something of a soil depletion issue as too much was being removed. It also went into how what was just a reuse of a waste product was now a raw material consuming industry of its own.
You amaze me. Pine cannot be burned in a fireplace, lest the chimney catch on fire.
I believe that by the time the wood has been converted to pellets the pitch has been removed and doesn’t tend to build up creosote. Also the pellets are compressed so that the lower density of softwood isn’t a factor.
Ah.
Just a note that the saw dust doesn’t only come from the lumber mills. Producers of pellets also provide trailers to production shops like cabinet makers. The dust collection dumps into those trailers. I don’t know what the actual economics of the exchange are.
You are quoting from a web site for crappy pellets.
The more popular they become, the less it becomes true that the source material is still a ‘waste’ product - and then they start being ‘not-cheap’.
It was late, I was tired. I grabbed the first one to support my POV. I can go to almost any pellet stove site and find the same thing just said differently. Softwood pellets are a better product for heating than hardwood. I’ve burned them for over 10 years. My parents did 5 years before that. My neighbors have a larger stove and have also burned pellets for almost 10 years. We all agree with the basics in the cited post. Soft has much less ash and an apparent higher heat output.
I heat with a similar, but different fuel source. Not the pellets but the bio bricks. Made from the same source material just a different size and shape. They come in different sizes and BTU capacities.
Love em, and i will never go back to burning cord wood. I don’t think the bio blocks are available from softwood, and if they were would not use. You do have to be sure to not overload the wood stove as they burn hotter than cord wood.
I don’t believe bio-bricks are in general the same source as wood pellets but a mix of wood scraps/dust and recycled cardboard. Perhaps OK for wood stoves but look disgusting in a fireplace where the ambiance is also the factor, biobricks looks like a big growing turd also I do question the higher heat output as they seem to be lower to me, mainly because they don’t burn as fast as they tend to self limit much like if you burn stacked paper, once that ash coating is established it limits the rest. Again a wood stove may not have this issue, or a longer smoldering burn may be desirable.
Look good to me, and once you get the fire going can’t tell the difference. Also there are different types. Some are easy to start and burn fast, others you can only get going putting on a bed of coals and they last long time. As said, I am never going back to cord wood.
Does it have to do with chopping it yourself?