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Using wood as a fuel for heating solutions is nothing new, though using biomass in pellet form for heating solutions has only really existed on commercial scale since the beginning of the 21st century. Basic log stoves and boilers have always been a division of home plus company heating solutions. However they have never really gained mass market appeal in the modern world. The obvious reasons for this is that they are very labour intensive, they are not very energy efficient, the fuel is not always locally accessible plus log shipping over longer distances is not economically viable or sustainable. Therefore the only people who have used log heating solutions are those either have access to their own or a local reserve of seasoned timber. The other issues are the logs generally sold are not seasoned down to the 30% required to achieve a satisfactory burn by limited smoke. On the other hand many of the biomass log dealers sell the fuel at prices which would not indicate that it contained between 40-50% moisture. The other major disadvantage is the volume of space that is required to store the timber. This therefore technique the biomass log heating market will never grow into a serious market contender in the 21st century. On the other hand pellets do offer a practical heating solution which can compete by means of other heating units.

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The principle of wood pellet fuel has actually existed since the 1970′s. Animal feed mill processors were experimenting with using biomass in the feed mills. Though the machinery is not ideal to create biomass pellets, they did make the first biomass pellet energy, plus a few biomass pellet fuel manufactures and pellet stove manufactures did enter the market. However at the time there was no real market share for the biomass pellet. Wood pellets are more expensive than biomass logs, as well as the payback were not well known. However they had much lower maintenance than combustion logs, they still required more maintenance than oil or gas heating solutions. At that time the price of oil in addition to gas was cheap, there we no concern over fuel reserve as well as no one was aware of climate change and carbon emissions. The biomass pellet market never really go going until the beginning of the 21st century, when the prices of oil plus gas began to rise plus concern over climate change was been started to be taken seriously. Sweden was well ahead of the rest of the world by way of wood pellet fuels, along with had proved the principle of the energy plus pellet stoves as well as pellet boilers.

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The characteristics of biomass pellet fuel is a uniform shape and size. These qualities mean wood pellets are ideal for automatic feeding systems by auger units. Wood pellet stoves as well as boiler have an integrate hopper which can hold at least a days worth of fuel. The burner is controller by computer which monitors the fire and feeds in the required amount of pellets to maintain the desired heat. As most pellet burners also have hot rod igniters they can ignite the pellets as well, so the pellet stove or boiler can turn its self on, on demand plus turn its self off by means of cutting off air flow to the fire. Wood pellets have a much higher density than biomass logs in addition to also a much lower moisture content below 10%. This method the pellets generate less ash in addition to less smoke, requiring less maintenance. Premium wood pellets produce only 0.5% ash.

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