Wood Pellet Boilers

Wood pellet boilers do so much more than cut your carbon emissions, but they are incredibly good at doing just that – while oil, gas and coal are fossil fuels produced deep within the earth’s crust over millions of years, wood pellet heat relies on trees, whose life cycle is much shorter and easier to harvest sustainably.

Both fossil fuels and trees contain “sequestered” carbon; in other words, carbon from the atmosphere or other sources is locked into the organic matter.  Once that sequestered carbon has been released from fossil fuels, it takes much longer to sequester carbon from the atmosphere back into fossil fuels than it takes for trees to complete the same process.

Plus, Maine already has a sustainable forestry industry that was created to fuel the paper industry, and as technology has spurred us to use less paper, mills have been seeking ways to use the abundance of Maine wood: wood pellets for heat are a great way for mills to stay in business and help maintain Maine’s forests.

Most Mainers don’t know that our state’s population sends $5 billion annually out of state for heating fuels including oil, gas and coal.  With wood pellets – an abundant natural resource – here in state, we have no need to use foreign oil or domestically (though out of state) produced oil or gas for home heat.  As our communities switch over to wood pellet heat, we keep our heating dollars in state, helping Maine’s economy stay strong and healthy, and creating jobs to support the renewable biomass heat industry.

When you heat with oil or gas, you are tied to a fuel source that is subject to wild price fluctuations based on global policies that we don’t have much control over here in Maine.  In fact, in the past 20 years, propane, oil and gas have experienced huge spikes and dips in prices, while generally climbing in price overall.

Wood pellet prices have remained relatively stable in the past 20 years, rising slightly to accommodate for inflation and other higher costs – but the global and political influences that manipulate fossil fuel prices don’t affect wood pellets in the same way, so we can count on more stability in the pricing of wood pellets as time goes on.

How much work goes into maintaining your wood pellet boiler?

When many of us hear “wood pellet boiler” our mind goes immediately to hauling bags of pellets from the car, lighting fires daily and sweeping out ashes every few days.  But today’s wood pellet boilers are significantly more automated than that.  True Northonly installs automated pellet boilers that have ash compaction that allow you to empty your ashes every few weeks rather than every few days in a closed storage container that makes cleanup significantly less messy.

Plus, with pellet delivery services, you don’t even have to use bagged pellets anymore.  True North can install a pellet storage hopper next to your boiler that can old up to 3 tons of pellets.  When you get low, your pellet delivery service will come and fill your hopper for you.