The Benefits Of A Clean Wood Pellet Store
If you’ve ever had a wood burner or a log store in your home, you’ll know just how messy even large bits of solid wood can be. Bark flakes off, moss and lichen blow around the room and the dust takes ages to clean. And that’s just the small amount you keep in the home.
Every now and then you can sweep out the log store and no real harm is done. And even if you don’t, nothing bad is going to happen to your stove. However, with a pellet burner the issue is slightly different.
Pellets are made with a hard exterior coating but the inside remains relatively soft. That means that when pellets break open a whole load of dust comes out. When you’re moving and storing millions of small pellets, this dust can really build up. So far, so similar to a log store. Except the way we move and burn logs differs from pellets.
Logs are picked up by hand, and because they are much larger, little of the dust makes it into the stove. By contrast, pellets are often moved using a scoop or shovel, meaning the dust is transported with it and thrown into the boiler. A little dust is no big deal but over time, large quantities of dust can clog boilers and burners, causing damage that can significantly shorten their life span.
This is why cleaning your fuel store on a semi-regular basis is such a good idea.
Here at the Wood Pellet Delivery Company, our pellets are specially treated to maintain their hard outer coating. That means they are much less likely to break into dust than some other pellets.
In fact, in an average customer order of five tons, less than 0.1% of our pellets will be dust. That’s compared to around 1% for normal orders . Now 1% might not sound like a lot but in an order that size it can be up to 50kg.
Over the course of several orders you’re talking hundreds of kilograms of dust potentially being thrown into the boiler. And that is a big problem.
Our pellets produce significantly less dust but we still recommend that in order to maintain a clean and healthy boiler, you should clean your fuel store periodically.
Good practice is to clean it roughly once every two years or after every five deliveries, whichever is sooner. If you can clean more regularly then that’s all the better.
The bottom line is that the less dust you put in the boiler, the healthier it will be and more efficiently it will run. Try to clean as best you can before each delivery you get in addition to a complete clean on the timescale mentioned above and that will help you to keep the dust levels to a minimum.
Get in touch with a member of the team at the Wood Pellet Delivery Company on 01493 800 662. We can advise you about the best practises for storing wood pellets and the benefits that come when you bulk buy wood pellets.