What equipment do I need to use wood pellets?

Pellets can be used to heat individual rooms, the whole building, or for specialist applications (e.g. barbecues, patio heaters, and someone has even invented a buggy that will run on them!).

The cheapest and simplest option is a stove to heat a room. More sophisticated pellet-stoves also come with back-boilers and can be plumbed in to your heating system to provide hot water and heat for the whole property. Larger buildings can be heated with dedicated pellet boilers.

All pellet-burners require somewhere to store the pellets. Hoppers are normally built into pellet-stoves and are typically loaded a bag at a time. Some boilers have a built-in pellet-store, but it is more common for it to be separate. A pellet store can be simpler and smaller than an equivalent store for wood chips, but generally, it is a good idea to have as large a store as you can accommodate. See our Design Guide and speak to suppliers for advice.

It is common to install a buffer tank to store hot water from the boiler, but unlike for chip and log boilers, this is not necessarily required for a modern pellet boiler. Again, your installer will advise.

In general, stoves require high-grade 6mm pellets. Some boilers also require high-grade 6mm pellets, but most can accept 8mm pellets as well, with some reconfiguring. Some more robust systems can accept a wide range of sizes and qualities of pellet. But you should be careful that pellets with too high an ash-content will cause slagging and clinkering in even the most robust boilers. And pellets with too low durability may cause problems for handling systems no matter how robust the boiler. If you are thinking of having a pellet boiler, make sure you ask what types of pellets it can handle, as this will affect your running costs (see our Price Guide).

There are many suppliers of pellet-stoves and -boilers in the UK. See our website for recommendations.