Why Old Wood Boilers Need To Be Replaced With Modern Wood Boilers

Heating home and businesses with wood has been a tradition for thousands of years, before the discovery of fossil fuels, wood was the stable fuel for everyone. However, once coal was discovered, and then later oil and gas, wood has been used less and less over recent generations, however that trend is now changing. The use of fossil fuels is now know to have implications on the global climate, in terms of accelerating global warming through increasing carbon dioxide emissions. As wood is part of the natural carbon cycle, burning wood doesn't not increase carbon dioxide emissions, as long as more wood or sufficient biomass is grown in its place. Therefore this has lead to wood heating having a revival, however some wood boilers are not very efficient for heat.

Why Old Wood Boilers Need To Be Replaced With Modern Wood Boilers

When it comes to looking at the efficiencies of wood boilers, what are we really talking about? The first aspect, is how efficiently does the boiler capture heat from the fuel it burns, this obviously impacts on fuel consumption and therefore how much money you have to spend on wood logs. Older wood boilers are not very efficient, and most of the heat is actually wasted up the chimney. However, modern gasification combustion log boilers capture much more of the heat produced during combustion, therefore use less wood to produce the same amount of heat as the older wood boilers. However, efficiency also comes down to how much smoke and particulates are produced. Reducing smoke is vital for a healthy environment and for the health of people. While smoke reduction is the job of the wood boiler, it also depends on the user burning dry wood logs.

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Why Old Wood Boilers Need To Be Replaced With Modern Wood Boilers

One of the main problems with wood boilers is the fact that most consumers are burning low quality fuel, producing a lot of smoke and little heat due the reduced combustion efficiency because of the high moisture content. For example, really when you are burning logs, you need to season it for around 2 years before the moisture content is around 20%, however many consumers get sold logs that are very wet, and still contain around 40% moisture. As well all know, wet wood doesn't burn very well, it not only lowers combustion temperature, it also increased the build up of creosote in the boiler. Now, even modern wood boilers cannot address this issue. However, you can use wood pellets and other biomass fuel pellets in wood boilers. You can get large pellet baskets which hold the fuel in the boiler, and then light and treat them the same as logs. Wood pellets burn much more efficiently, and produce less ash and much more heat.

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