Pellet fires vs woodburners?
Home » Blog » Sarah Heeringa » Winter wood dilemmaOpen fires produce high emissions and are hopelessly inefficient, coal-burners are evil and fake-flame gas heaters are for grannies. If you love fire, what are your best options?
Image by Naveen Roy via Flickr
As much as 90 percent of an open fire’s heat can disappear up the chimney. For real heat—and real flames—the choice boils down to either a late model pellet fire or woodburner. Whichever way you jump will ultimately depend on what’s most important to you: efficiency, ease of use, cost, maximum heat output or aesthetics.
Not all firewood is equal. Soft woods like pine dry faster than slower burning hardwoods like manuka, which can take up to 18 months to cure.
Then there's the issue of how much wood you need and where to store it all. The New Zealand Home Heating Association suggests that heating an entire house with a high-efficiency woodburner might gobble up between two and three cubic metres of hardwood each year. That's quite a large area taken up by the wood pile.
If you install a pellet burner you'll need the special wood pellets, made using forest industry waste. A typical household might use between one and 1½ tonnes of pellets per year, which equates to 50 bags. This takes up approximately 1.5 square metres of storage space.
According to the Bioenergy Association of New Zealand, one ton of wood pellets has the heat value of about 5m³ of firewood and stacks easily in one-third of the space. This makes it possible to easily store fuel for the entire season.
But storage space is just one consideration to factor in.
Check out the full article in the June/July 2009 issue of Good, on sale now, for all the pros and cons—and to see which way Good jumps.
Tue June 16, 2009 @ 10:34 AM
