Saturday 17 December 2016

Five Years on

We have now had our wood pellet boiler five years.  The RHI payments have been arriving since last summer and mean that our heating bills are more than covered until 2022.  The price of a pallet (975kg) of pellets has not really changed since our first order in 2012.  The most we have paid is £260 in January 2015 while todays prices are back the to £225/pallet we first paid in 2012.
We buy our pellets from White Horse Energy as they have always been price competitive and reliable.  The pallets then get chopped up to make kindling for our wood burner!

The graph below shows our cumulative usage each year as measured by the boiler.  In 2014 we re-fitted our kitchen and installed underfloor heating downstairs which has reduced our pellet consumption.  We are fitting new windows in 2017 and hope this will reduce consumption further!



Although the main motivation of installing the boiler was to reduce our CO2 emissions, price of heating our home was also a consideration as back in 2012, oil prices were really high.  They have dropped considerably since but are now on their way back up again, so with the price of wood pellets staying stable we are glad to be insulated from these large fluctuations in heating costs!