15 Jan

wood pellet heating

by Robin

We fired up our new wood pellet stove this week, yay! Cold days are coming so we are glad to have our new system running.

In the Netherlands we are used to heat our houses with natural gas. Recently the government decided we have to stop using natural gas. So what if you need a new system right now? We could have chosen a heat pump and switch to electric energy. But an old barn wich is not heavily insulated will not work very wel with a heat pump.

There is some debate about wood pellets being a sustainable fuel source or not. I think it depends on how the fuel is made. As with everything this can be done in good and bad ways. Fact is, growing trees clean the air, mature trees much less so. Harvesting fast growing trees and replanting them directly in a susttainable way is likely a lot less bad for our environment than molesting a tropical forest.

Installing in our old barn did pose some challenges like how are we going to mount our chimney...
Happily there is a makers workshop in our barn, so I welded a stand from some old pieces of steel I found.

What's next?

Now we are able to heat our barn during the cold winter days, we will add solar heating to our system. We are slowly switching to florr heating and low temperature heta radiators.
Firste extension of the system wil be a large water buffer tank to store the generated heat. This makes operating the pellet system more efficient and allows for connecting solar panels to the system.
The solar panels will generate enough heat most time of the year so we don't need any fuel most time of the year.
During the colder months tap water may need some extra heating to keep things safe (legionella prevention, water should be stored at >65 degrees celcius). This will help us to burn much less fuel.

construction building skyscraper