Wood pellet -- pros and cons?

[Ian]

I'm going to look at a new house soon where there is the option of oil or wood pellet heating. Which should I go for?

[AJH]

How stable is the supply of pellets where you are?

Where is the pellet boiler fitted compared with the oil boiler?

What grade of pellets?

Running a pellet boiler still needs more input than the oil boiler, does it have automatic feed from a hopper or will you have to hump

18kg bags into it? Does it have automatic de ashing? Does it have automatic cleaning of the heat exchangers?

I have an old pellet warm air heater, because we imported some in

1996, and it does have drawbacks, noise being one. I did maintenance on a fully automated system which was much more modern but I was called out at least 4 times last year from fuel problems (damp, rag blocking hopper outlet, ash fusing in automatic de-asher) and I've never had loss of heat from an oil boiler.

AJH

[Steve Firth]

Gas.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you can get the wood, and dont mind a probably twice daily chore of loading and emptying, or the issue of coming home to an icy house after a weekend away, go pellets.

Otherwise pay teh premuem for hassle free heating with oil.

Or put in a heat pump.

[dennis]

Wood pellet boilers are going to become very expensive soon. There is a limit to how much wood growing is possible, once demand exceeds supply prices will rise rapidly to match those of oil and gas. I don't know if it will be this year or next but it will happen. Its the same for all "green" fuels, there isn't enough if a lot switch (maybe we need to import lots of "green" fuel?).

[Dave Liquorice]

That I think is the clincher along with space to store it dry.

Modern ones don't require daily filling/emptying, not sure they stretch to a week but at least several days. Effciently burnt wood does not produce much ash. The ash aspect might be an issue with some hyper clean folks, depends where the boiler is located.

See above there is no reason that a decent wood pellet boiler isn't as controlable as oil. Fuel supply could be problem for long periods of abscence, depends how big it's hopper is, if it needed to burn a bit to keep the house frost free. Same could be said for oil if you didn't ensure it had enough in before going away...