Can Wood Pellets Save You Money Instead Of Natural Gas And Fuel Oil?

Can Wood Pellets Save You Money Instead Of Natural Gas And Fuel Oil?

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Sure wood pellets are renewable, made from wood scrap and manufactured domestically, but do they save me money? The answer is maybe. As one would expect that depend on the price spent for each. So the purpose of this article is not to give a simple yes or no answer but to prepare the interested reader with the tools to figure it out. I will contrast wood pellet with the 2 major sources of heating natural gas and fuel oil. To complicate matters each of the three energy sources are sold by different units. Wood Pellets are sold by the ton (US ton for this article) Natural Gas by the therm and Fuel Oil by the gallon. The first thing to do is get the correct costs for what you want to compare some quick web searching should make this pretty easy so I won't go into that here.

The second step is to convert the unit your product is sold by into a standard measure for energy in this case BTU which stands for British Thermal Units. A Gallon of fuel oil contains 138,690 BTU. A Therm is actually defined as 100,000 BTU. A ton (2,000 pounds) of wood pellets contains 16,500,000 BTU. Now we have to convert the BTU numbers to price per one million BTU, this just means we have to divide and multiply to get to the same number of BTU for each product. The equation is as follows [price per unit] divided by [BTU per unit] multiplied by [1 million] to get [price per million BTU] which is what we want because now we can compare on to the other by simply looking at the price per Million-BTU. Her comes some examples. If natural gas costs $1.23 per therm then [1.23/100,000] x 1,000,000 = $12.30 for 1 million BTU of natural gas. If fuel oil cost $2.36 per gallon then [2.36/138,690] x 1,000,000 = $17.02 for 1 million-BTU. If wood pellets cost $200 per ton then [200/16,500,000] x 1,000,000 = $12.12 for 1 million-BTU. We all know prices vary and all fuel will cost more in the winter when most needed. Wood Pellet has a distinct advantage that it can be easily bought in the summer and stored until cold.

Now the above is just about raw energy contained in the fuel, you still need to convert that into heat in your home so you should take the calculations one step further and figure in the efficiency of the furnace being used.

About the Author:
If you want further reading about how to make wood pellets go to MakeWoodPelletsHQ.com
About the Author
Burt Andrews is an Architect with over 20 years of experience, in designing a wide range of projects. He blogs about restaurant design. He is a principal at Larson and Darby Group in charge of the St. Charles, IL office.



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