In Your Home - energy-use is so much a part of modern life that we don’t usually give it a moment’s thought.

Wood pellet burners

Wood pellet burners are gaining popularity due to their clean burning properties and convenience, despite only being relatively new to the New Zealand market.

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About wood pellet burners

Wood pellet burners look similar to conventional wood burners in the sense that they are available as freestanding or fire place insert models.

However wood pellet burners offer you the ability to have a lot more control over how much heat is produced and when.

Better heating efficiency

With a wood pellet burner you can:

  • adjust the rate that pellets are consumed. This gives you control over the amount of heat produced.
  • control your room temperature via a thermostat
  • use a timer can provide automatic switching on and off. This is in direct contrast to wood burners where typically there is only a small ability to vary the both fuel and air settings

How it differ from a wood burner

Use wood pellets

The pellets used in wood pellet burners are made from 100% wood residues (usually sawdust and wood shavings) that are dried and compressed into small cylinders with the aid of steam.

Less emissions

Wood pellet burners are the most environmentally friendly way of heating your home – more so than wood burners.

Under test conditions, wood pellets emit up to 0.7 gram of fine particle soot for every kilogram of fuel burnt. This is less than the cleanest wood burner which produces about 1.0 gram of soot.

However in the home, it is very difficult to judge whether the logs you are burning are dry. Therefore the particle soot that is emitted from a wood burner may be far greater than 1.0 gram/kg of fuel burnt.

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More information

Consumers’ Institute Pellet burner free checklist. [Consumers’ Institute website.]

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EECA Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority - Te Tari Tiaki Pūngao.