Help! Has anyone had pellet quality problems with blown pellets?

peter_964rs

Hi All

I had a delivery of 5t of blown pellets from a well-known supplier on Jan 20, into my pellet store. The day after, the feed from the pellet store blocked up. I put this down to residual dust or similar causing the blockage and had my biomass installer come and unblock it for me, which involved digging up the transfer pipes that go from the store to my boiler room. Cost!

I have used this supplier four or five times before and have always been happy with them. Their lorry fits through my gates and I have never had a problem with any of the feed from the store.

Three weeks went by. I (rather my wife) delivered a baby son on the 24th. Life got difficult.

Wednesday 15th Feb it blocked up again. Another call out and several attempts to unblock it but it repeatedly blocked up. We got a specialist in to run a camera down the pipe - no sign of any issues with the pipe whatsoever.

So we took samples from the auger at the bottom of the pellet store, and from the pipe when it blocked again, and from the top of my boiler's 'day hopper' of pellets that had made it through. Clearly you could see they were of inferior quality to the bagged stuff I was temporarily hoovering up with a jury-rigged bucket on a chair in my boiler room.

We deduced this was fuel quality fairly quickly as the store is double-lined, shows no sign of water ingress anywhere, and the coincidence of multiple blockages is too high. On top of which, I had successfully burned about 750kg of fuel in between the first blockage in Jan and the more recent one after baby's arrival. So all that fuel has made its way through the pipes without incident and I am definitely well into my 5t delivery.

On discussing it with my biomass installer, it may be that some pellets have gotten wet at some point, and then been mixed in with other dry pellets somewhere in the supply chain in the hope that they'll be fine. Obviously I'm now getting a 'vein' of the previously-wet ones.

I've kept the samples and taken photographs, and compared them with the nice, shiny bagged stuff I'm having to vacuum up manually. It's clear they're dusty, slightly swollen and not shiny at all.

I sent all the findings to my supplier this Monday and, despite repeatedly chasing and pointing out that I now have a 1 month old baby son, and a 2yr old daughter as it happens, and need urgent resolution to this issue because obviously I need to keep the house warm and can't keep up with a jury-rigged bagged solution that costs me more money, they've only just come back to me.

Saying: our lorries are pressurised so there is no chance they had a problem; if pellets need to be tested for moisture content they have to be sent away to a lab at my cost.

Hmm.

So: I have some questions for the community....

1. Supplier may get their pellets from wholesalers. Wholesalers probably get them from multiple sources, some of which are overseas. I saw an article on C4 news last night suggesting a lot of pellets come from the States. So I'm guessing there could be a problem with a specific batch. Aside from taking legal action, or otherwise, against my supplier, is there any forum or group of biomass users other than this one where people exchange news on pellet quality? Also on which suppliers take positive action on quality control, and which are the slippery ones that do their best to avoid admitting liability and you have to take legal action against them to get something done.
2. What's my legal position here? Do I have to prove their pellets are at fault if they won't come and test themselves? This is all far too stressful are precisely this time, I'm rather sleep deprived!
3. My supply actually came from a local agent of a chain of specialist farming supermarkets, who get the pellets from the well-known supplier I mentioned. So my contract is not with the supplier, but with the farming supermarket, but all they're doing is forwarding the email response they've had from their supplier. What should I do next?
4. Any other ideas?

Tks

thozza

Presumably your contract of supply is with the 'local agent', and as a consumer, the Consumer Rights Act should protect you if you suffer from the supply of faulty goods, this applies just as much to wood pellets as to any other product.

It is probably worth contacting Citizens Advice (or Which if you are a member) to get some advise on how to pursue the issue, but in the first instance a stiff letter to the 'local agent' outlining their responsibilities to you would be a first step, they should not be fobbing you off to the supplier.

It is entirely possible that the pellets are not of the correct quality, testing can be done and there are a number of laboratories doing such testing e.g. http://www.woodfueltesting.co.uk/wood-fuel-customer.html, however costs might be an issue, so it is not a step to take without pursuing other means first.