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Heating with Wood Pellets in Austria
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*The Renewable Heat
Wood pellets feature a decisive advantage: The raw material they are produced from is renewable. Austria is among the most richly forested countries in Europe. Over 30 million solid cubic meters of wood grow back each year. The timber stock in Austrian forests has been increasing for years, despite intensive utilization as construction timber, for paper manufacturing, and as an energy source.
*Future-Proof
The investment in a new heating system is costly and should make sense in the long run. Enormous price increases and incalculable risks characterize the supply of natural gas and oil. In comparison, the supply of wood from domestic forests is much more secure. Austria produces more wood pellets solely as by-products of timber processing than are consumed in the country today.
*Cost-Effective
The economic advantages of wood pellets are striking: Compared to mineral oil or natural gas, you can save about half of the heating costs.
An important factor for the cost-effectiveness of wood pellet heating is the highly efficient heating devices that were developed for this fuel. Wood pellet central heating boilers, like wood pellet stoves, can transform more than 90 % of the energy contained in the fuel into usable heat.
It is this combination of low fuel costs and efficient utilization that makes wood pellets so cost-effective.
*Comfortable
The wood pellet central heating boiler stands out by reason of its high comfort and cleanness. The fuel is delivered by silo truck and is automatically conveyed from the store into the boiler. Ignition, control, boiler cleaning and de-ashing happen in a fully automatic manner. What remains to be done is to empty the ash box once or twice per heating season.
Wood pellet stoves show high comfort advantages as opposed to conventional wood stoves. Filled once with wood pellets, a wood pellet stove automatically provides consistent heating for 2-3 days. Every week or two, the ashes have to be removed. Technical refinements, such as switching on, switching off and monitoring the wood pellet heater, resp., the wood pellet stove by mobile phone round off the topic of comfort.
*Environmentally Friendly
Since wood absorbs the same quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere while growing as is emitted during combustion, wood fuels prevent an increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Even if one takes the deployment of fossil fuels for the production and transport of wood pellets into account, the result is a CO2 reduction of over 95 % compared to the use of heating oil. That is the finding of a study which examined energy usage during wood pellet production in Austria.
A crucial environmental advantage of wood pellet heating is the extraordinarily low emissions. The dry fuel, the electronic regulation of combustion air and the hot combustion chamber provide for an optimal and clean burning.
A wood pellet central heating boiler for a large single-family house thus emits less than 1 kg of ash per year in the form of fine particulates – an extremely slight amount if one considers that the total emission of fines in Austria lies at 50,000 tons per year.
*Domestic Economy
The utilization of wood pellets not only offers advantages for the environment and clear economic advantages for the customers, but also a secure future market for domestic companies that deliver the fuel, manufacture the devices, or install and service them.
A study (of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology) assumes that the usage of wood fuels in Austria in 2011 amounted to a turnover of over € 1.4 million and therefore secured around 14,200 jobs.
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