Pellet consumption estimate calculation

What will be my future consumption of pellets and especially its cost compared to fuel oil?

Heating with wood pellets (or pellets): Questions to ask before choosing this method of heating?

Your consumption of pellets will obviously depend on your energy needs. If you know them, then it will be easy to estimate your pellet consumption.

For this, we have developed in detail several methods on the page well size its wood boiler which we summarize here.

Method 1: make a complete and complete thermal study

A thermal study will give you an estimated consumption in kWh per year.

If so, simply divide by 5 to obtain about your needs kg pellets.

Examples: a 150 m² house which has an energy requirement of 100 kWh / m².year will need 150 * 100 = 15 kWh per year, i.e. 000 / 15 = 000 kg of pellets = 5 Tons per year of pellets (or 3000 L of equivalent fuel oil, see method 3)

Read also:  Wood and pellet stoves: reduce your energy bill!

Method 2: use your current gas or fuel oil consumption

The equivalence is very simple: 2kg of pellets = 1 L of fuel oil = 1 m3 of gas.

Examples: if your consumption is 2500 L of fuel oil or 2500 m3 of gas, you will need 2500 * 2 = 5000 kg = 5 Tons per year of pellets.

How much will I earn compared to fuel oil?

It all depends on the price at which you will find your pellets and the prices are variable (see Why choose wood pellets?).

Suppose you touch the pellet 200 € / t delivered (price generally found in 2007) and the oil for € 0,65 1000L.

kWh prices would therefore:
- € 0,04 per kWh for pellets
- € 0,065 per kWh for fuel oil.

By switching to pellets, you can therefore reduce your energy bill per kWh from 0,065 € to 0,04 €, ie by almost 40%!

In other words, your energy bill could be almost divided by 2, but beware of the stability of the price of pellets if they are not (yet) regulated, unlike fossil fuels. View discussion future price of pellets?

Read also:  Properties of wood pellets

More: Why choose wood pellets?
-Read more about the Wood Pellets folder: Silo, storage and automatic feeding of wood pellets
- Previous article: Properly size a pellet boiler

7 comments on “Pellet consumption estimate calculation”

  1. Hello,
    I have to renovate an old house of about 70m2 on 3 levels, with renovation and interior insulation.
    Do you have statistics to assess the average consumption in the Lorraine / Luxembourg border region for a winter?
    I must decide on the heating mode before starting work.
    Thank you in advance for your help.

  2. I will allow myself a small correction:
    domestic fuel oil: 10 kWh of PCI / liter;
    natural gas: 10 kWh of PCI / m³;
    propane: 12,8 kWh of PCI / kg;
    wood in logs at 20% humidity: 3,8 kWh of PCI / kg or 1 to 500 kWh of PCI / cubic meter depending on the density of the wood;
    forest chips or wood chips at 25% humidity: 3,5 kWh of PCI / kg or 900 kWh of PCI / m³;
    wood pellets: 4,6 kWh of PCI / kg.
    it would be to learn to calculate
    wood pellets are hardly more profitable than fossil fuels, even worse they develop by burning as much or more CO2

    1. Co2 which was captured by this same wood during its growth. Releasing this CO2 therefore does not increase the amount of carbon on the surface of the globe. Comparing these CO2 emissions to those emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels (which releases carbon on the Earth's surface that was buried) is not appropriate.
      You even release CO2 by breathing. Its environmental impact is nil: the carbon contained comes from your food, which captured it in the CO2 from the air during photosynthesis...

      In short, burning wood does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (except in the case of deforestation)

  3. Nath
    it is the quality of combustion and filtration that make the difference. This is what I was taught ... If someone can teach me more and in detail I am a stakeholder. It is true that I do not know enough about the subject and that I have wondered for a long time why governments subsidize wood heating (or its derivatives) as part of the reduction of greenhouse gases?
    I'm listening to you. Thank you !

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