Wood pellets are made from the dry sawdust of waste wood, and are much easier to transport and handle than other forms of wood fuel. They are formed at high pressure to produce an extremely dense fuel of consistent quality, and have a very low moisture content. Together, these properties make wood pellets ideal for use in fully automatic small-scale heating systems. In a house or business premises they can directly replace oil or gas as a primary energy source for central heating and production of hot water.

Wood is a renewable resource: the amount of carbon emitted as it burns is equivalent to the amount of carbon which was absorbed as the tree grew. Additionally, wood pellets are normally manufactured from sawmill waste which could otherwise become a landfill problem. Diverting it to provide a sustainable fuel source is therefore doubly advantageous from an environmental perspective. It is true that a small amount of energy is used in manufacturing wood pellet fuels, but this is less than the amount of energy used, for example, in refining crude oil. And as wood pellets are produced in the USA and Canada the environmental impacts of transporting this fuel are also lessened - and of course, the impact of transporting wood pellets is significantly less than the damage caused by obtaining foreign oil and transporting it literally half way around the world.

The Ökofen automatic wood pellet heating systems we supply are available in a range of sizes to suit anything from a small, energy-efficient house to a large office or business premises. They are fully automated and require refuelling as little as once every twelve months, so are every bit as convenient as an oil, lp or gas heating system. Wood pellet fuel for the Ökofen boiler systems is now available in bulk in New England, and (depending on fluctuations in the price of oil) is very competitively priced compared to heating oil, and is cheaper than LPG in most situations.