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Biomass wood pellet prices - bagged and bulk
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You're right , the market is opening up. I know the Premier Fuel owner and he is very much for full transparency in the market place. Dalby Firewood is also diversifying into pellets and he's for full transparency. Compare this to Billington who want nothing to do with being compared. I rang Billington and the salesman spent the best part of half the conversation absolutely tearing apart Brites and how they can cause thousands of pounds of damage to boilers. Imagine the confusion this causes!
at the end of the day we need legislation, governed by Ofgem, whereby suppliers have to provide up to date product/brand specific specifications for their products. I've chatted with Ofgem and they state that this would have to be purely voluntary at this stage, so we're many years away from a good solution. WPG is a good solution, probably the best currently available, and it would be unethical me to say anything bad about them because I am at the moment coding an alternative solution with an extra layer of transparency that reflects delivery dates, delivery costs, product reviews and also compares firewood, briquettes and woodchip.
On the other hand, some companies could use slab wood as well, adding some bark into their pellets. Bark allows you to get more value, so you could get around 4.8 kcal/kg. But they will look darker and ash will be <0.7% (which is still A1 quality).
And the calorific value can't be sustainable. It will always move here and there, getting lower or higher time to time. It depends on many things. So producers can't say that they will always provide 5 kcal/kg. They won't.
For example, you can use whole wood trunks, then debark them for production. Therefore your pellets will have no bark, no additives, no sand, not whatsoever. Ash will be low, and NCV is stable and regular.
You also could be using some other raw material with additive bark. It increases bad additives, makes ash content higher a bit, but it does increase NCV.
It depends on the production line and volumes of it. The bigger company is, the easier production process they want to get.
At the end of the day every producer will have its own pros and cons.
http://www.liverpoolwoodpellets.co.uk/ourshop/prod_2524015-1000kg-of-Brites-Wood-Pellets-10kg-Bags-BSL01234260002.html
They've reduced their own branded pellets from £275 to £245 today as well
I checked back to the price I was paying for Brites the 2 winters previous to this, in 2014 I was paying £240 for a Tonne, although that took a lot of bargaining & in fact the load I got was short of a few bags, maybe accidentally as they came loose in a van.
What we have now is a much more level playing field and an opportunity to compare experiences.
On the latter, my pallet of AKZ arrived on Tuesday, following an order to WHE on Friday. They are really well stacked compared to the other pellets I've had which probably contributed to there being no tears on the packaging. Hopefully they burn as good as they look!
As for the Baltic pellets' quality, I'm using up some bags of Brites that I had left over, they seem to produce a little less ash than the Premium Plus, but just about the same amount of soot on my boiler glass.