Potential in pellets

Heating your home in Canada during the colder months of the year is not an option.

How your heat your home, however, is another story and rising costs for traditional energy sources like oil have prompted many Canadians to seriously explore alternative technologies.

In growing numbers the option many Canadians are choosing is wood pellets, a fuel produced from sawdust from either hardwoods or softwoods.

In Prince Edward Island alone, more than 1,200 homes are currently utilizing wood pellets to fuel either their stove or their furnace.

And the numbers are climbing steadily.

Juanita Corrigan, co-owner of Corrigans Wood Stove Centre in Charlottetown, says her store alone is installing as many as four units a day, five days a week.

Corrigan says demand is growing but inventory is sufficient to keep up with that demand.

Retailers across the region selling stoves and furnaces that utilize wood pellet technology are seeing high levels of activity, so much so theyre exhausting available supplies of fuel in some areas.

News footage aired as recently as last week showed long lineups for wood pellets at retailers in the Halifax area.

Shortages have been reported in Cape Breton as well.

But there is no shortage of wood pellets in Prince Edward Island.

One big reason for that is Paul Lawson.

Lawson and business partner Shane Mills, co-owners of Lawson Mills Fuel Services, saw the potential for wood pellet use in PEI and began investing in the technology to produce this fuel on PEI.

Their production facility is not yet fully operational but in the meantime the company has been able to secure sufficient quantities from an unnamed mainland supplier to carry all of its customers through the winter and beyond

Lawson, who came to Canada from Britain where wood pellets have been a popular fuel source for many years, says there are significant fuel savings to be had with this technology.

My own home is a century home with about 3,000 square feet of space, Lawson said. Two years ago, I paid about $700 a month through the winter for home heating oil. Now on a really cold day, I go through about three bags of pellets, at $6 a bag, other days much less. The cost of using wood pellets is about half the cost of oil. A small bungalow can get by on as little as one bag of pellets a day.

He said the amount of money a homeowner can save by switching to wood pellets depends on several factors, not the least of which are the age of the homeolder homes tend to lose more heat through leaks around doors, windows and foundations because of insufficient insulationand the temperature at which people are comfortable.

With pellets in high demand Lawson and his partner could easily raise their prices and make more money but he says they have no intention of doing that.

Were trying to build this business and we want to build it based on a reputation for quality of product and quality of service, Lawson said.

To that end, theyve stockpiled a very large inventory of wood pellets from one of their suppliers.

We saw early on that supply might become an issue so we took steps to avoid that.

To help cope with future demands Lawson and his partner are developing their own pellet mill.

Theyve already begun work but are not fully operational.

Our goal is to have our own production line fully operational this summer so we can have a ready supply of our own pellets for next season.

Lawson and his partner purchased the equipment necessary to produce wood pellets from China and the U.S.

Our initial goal was to supply 20 to 30 tonnes a week to local pellet stove owners and we acquired a regular supply of sawdust from a mill in New Brunswick to help us do that.

After a short time and the help of a little word of mouth we realized that the market for delivery was huge because people did not want to be going down to the local hardware store and handling 20- to 40-pound bags. We also realized that our supply was not going to be enough so early on we contacted a large pellet mill on the mainland that has been producing our pellets for us for some time now.

They have put a delivery service in place which delivers pellets directly to your home and unloads them for you.

Lawson said theyve become so efficient at unloading the product they can unload a tonne of product, enough to do many homes for a month, in five minutes.

And the cost, delivered, is about $315.

Depending on the size of your home, using wood pellets to generate heat can shave thousands of dollars off your heating bill but its not without its challenges.

One of the biggest challenges weve faced with bagging and distributing pellets is cleaning out the finesloose particles from the hardwood pellets. As any stove owner knows, sawdust is not good for the auger systems of the stoves often creating jams or too much ash. So we have developed a two-screen system that not only cleans the sawdust from the product but also vibrates the product to remove even the finer dust. Even though this is very labour-intensive we have had great success with this new equipment and would like to thank the various Island businesses that have helped us with the development.

They bag their product in clear bags so customers can see how clean it is.

And in keeping with the companys green policies theyre asking customers to keep those bags for re-use.

In future, they hope to be able to eliminate the use of bags as much as possible by supplying customers with hopper systems that they would fill with hybrid blower trucks. The Guardian