Turn Waste Wood into Home Heat: Buy a Pellet Stove
(Page 3 of 6)
February/March 2009
By Steve Maxwell
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Some heating pellets are made from the byproducts of lumber mills and planing plants, though not all pellets can boast this origin. Besides the obvious advantage of making use of a renewable biomass resource that otherwise would rot in a huge heap somewhere, there’s the whole issue of carbon emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect.
When you burn any kind of biomass for heat, carbon is released into the atmosphere, but biomass carbon needs to be considered differently than carbon released from fossil fuels. To understand this better, let’s look more closely at a wood pellet facility.
The Lauzon Recycled Wood Energy pellet mill in Quebec, Canada, is one of the largest producers of pellets in eastern North America. It’s part of a hardwood flooring operation that uses bark-free planer shavings as feedstock for 90,000 tons of low-ash, high-energy hardwood pellets sold each year under the Cubex brand name. If the shavings here weren’t made into pellets, they’d rot on their own, slowly returning most of the carbon they contain to the atmosphere. This carbon is on its way up anyway. Turning the wood shavings into pellets and using it for home heating just ties into a part of the carbon cycle that’s operating whether we make use of it or not. Contrast this with ancient carbon released from far underground by burning fossil fuels, and you can see that carbon emissions from burning wood should not be regarded the same way.
Installing a Pellet Appliance
Pellet appliances come in three main types: stoves, fireplace inserts and furnaces/boilers, with stoves being the most popular by far. Because the heat exchanger cools the exhaust gases to a relatively low temperature, pellet appliances don’t need a conventional woodstove chimney. After initial start-up, exhaust gases are smokeless, meaning that creosote does not build up and there is no risk of chimney fires. This is good, but the venting system is still a vital component that needs special characteristics to function reliably.
The exhaust from pellet stoves is typically vented outdoors through a 3- or 4-inch diameter, double-walled steel pipe. Unlike conventional woodstoves that depend on negative pressure due to natural chimney draft, pellet exhaust systems operate under positive pressure because an internal fan forces the exhaust into the vent. This means the job of assembling the vents is quite different than with a regular woodstove. It’s essential to seal all twist-lock joints carefully according to the manufacturer’s instructions. If you don’t, exhaust will make its way inside your house.
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