Big pellets, big price
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 12:00AM Those of you who don’t heat with wood and have no intention of heating with wood can go out to the kitchen and have a sandwich or something. This is for the woodstove crowd, and the consumer protection crowd, if any have stopped in.
With the price of heating oil, propane, and natural gas bouncing around, many homeowners are turning to firewood for space heating. Some are installing pellet stoves instead of the old-style chunk wood stoves. There is another development in the field, a kind of halfway measure called compressed wood firelogs.
The pellets that go in pellet stoves are made of sawdust compressed and extruded into what looks like animal feed. Think of it as beaver kibble. Some manufacturers have upsized the process to produce ersatz logs from compressed hardwood waste. They go by names such as EcoLogs, SmartLogs, Envi-Logs, PowerLogs, and Bio-Bricks. Most are about 10” long and 3” in diameter. So far, so good. Yet another waste stream recycled in a useful manner.
I decided to try out a few boxes of the EcoLogs recently and came to a couple of conclusions. First Conclusion: This particular product fell apart as it burned, exposing huge amounts of surface area and burning too hot and fast for a woodstove. Second Conclusion: There is something wrong about the advertised comparison between compressed wood logs and real firewood.
The advertising pamphlet handed out by the farm supply store where I got the EcoLogs claimed that 40 boxes of logs equaled a cord of firewood. A similar product, the slightly larger Smartlogs, claimed that 30 boxes equaled a cord. I did a little investigating.
A forum on the ever useful website Hearth.com had a comment by the U.S. distributor of Smartlogs, as follows:
“We would like to Thank everyone who is interested in SmartLog and alternative energy products in general. We are the U.S. representatives for SmartLog and can only speak to the facts of our product. Our logs have been extensively third party tested in Canada and our logs deliver 7,800 BTU’s/lb vs. 5266 BTU’s/lb of tested sugar maple with 20-30% moisture. Our logs are Octagon shaped and do not roll. SmartLog is 3"X3"X10" and weights 3.3 pounds per log with a 6-8% moisture content. SmartLog lights easily and produces far less creosote and harmful emissions than ordinary fire wood and is EPA certified. We offer 6 and 12 piece boxes. 30 Boxes (360 Logs) is equivalent to 1 US Cord based on BTU’s generated.”
As they say on NPR’s financial show Marketplace, “Let’s do the numbers…”
(Unit note: A BTU is a British Thermal Unit, the amount of heat necessary to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. For a better visual, it roughly equals the heat released by burning one wooden kitchen match.)
For sugar maple, the standard numbers are 3,757 pounds per cord and 24,000,000 BTU per cord, or a theoretical heat production of 6,388 BTU per pound. According to Smartlog, sugar maple gives a real world 5,266 BTU per pound, for a total of 19,784,362 BTU per cord. Almost 20 million BTU per cord – I can believe that.
Smartlogs weigh 3.3 pounds per log. Multiplied by 360 logs this equals 1,188 pounds. Using SmartLog’s own numbers, 1,188 pounds x 7,800 BTU per pound equals 9,266,400 BTU.
9 million BTU versus 19 million BTU. Somebody dropped a 1 somehow.
Unless, possibly, the weight of a cord of sugar maple is a lot less than advertised: 9,266,400 BTU divided by 5266 BTU per pound for maple equals 1,760 pounds per cord instead of 3,757? It must have been that helium impregnated maple.
The numbers for EcoLogs come out much the same: 30 pounds per box times 40 boxes equals 1,200 pounds, multiplied by 7,800 BTU per pound equals 9,360,000 BTU. Again, 10 million BTU somehow wandered away.
The cost for 1,200 pounds of EcoLogs or Smartlogs is around $250, so in real terms this wood alternative is running about $525 a cord. This is over twice the going rate for cut, split, and delivered hardwood in my area. I called a local lumberyard that was offering PowerLogs by the one ton pallet for $585. The woman on the phone claimed that 2,000 pounds of PowerLogs were equal to “two and one-third cords” of normal firewood. Again, off by a more than a factor of two.
I don’t really blame the local suppliers for this. They get the promotional material from the manufacturers and rely on it, just like any other product. In fact, the compressed log manufacturers may be perfectly accurate about the heat output of their own product. They are being misleading about the comparison, in both weight and cost, between their products and ordinary firewood.
This is a departure from my usual political essays, but with so many people having a tough time paying their heating bills as it is, I hate to see them buy what passes for firewood at a price per BTU that rivals oil. I hope that the consumer protection advocates in state government crack down on this and force the manufacturers to put some real numbers on their products.
Reader Comments (4)
You left out the beaver kibbles... any comment on those?
I hear they are going to manufacture them in VT.
The manufacturers are probably talking about face cords, which can be as little as a quarter of a full cord. In all the areas I've lived (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Upstate New York), a face cord is a single stack of logs that is four feet high and eight feet long. This means that a face cord is highly dependent on the length of each log. If your logs are four feet long (as can be used in some outdoor boilers), you have a full cord. If your logs are two feet long (as I used in an old Sam Daniels whole house furnace), you have half a cord. If your logs are 16 inches long (as many smaller parlor stoves require), you have a third of a full cord. All of these would be called a "cord" by at least some of the people selling firewood in the places I've lived.
Mr. Morris: Could be, although in my experience the word "cord" used by itself designates a full cord, 128 cubic feet. The speaker or writer always adds the modifier "face" to mean a face cord, unless he or she is trying to get away with something. Dividing out the 1,760 lb "SmartLog cord" by the full weight 3,757 lb sugar maple cord gives 0.47 of a cord, which might correspond to two foot logs, but given the 10" length of SmartLogs, somehow I doubt it.
Didier: Really, the beaver do not need kibble - the tree you treasure most is their kibble.
Send this info along to the VT Attorney Gen office Consumer Affairs Dept, and maybe the public utilities commission. They just might do something.