Professional Solar Panel Installers in York

A biomass boiler is a boiler designed to burn solid fuels classed as biomass. Such boilers can be supplied to burn every form of biomass from woodchips, wood pellets or logs to waste agricultural materials such as straw and grain husks, olive kernels, rice and the dust from any of these including sawdust. Boilers need to be designed to burn specific materials, with any given boiler able to burn a limited range of biomass.

All but the smallest of biomass systems can be configured to work fully automatically. Typical automated features include time switch or optimum start/stop, fuel feed, de-ashing and flue cleaning. The majority of boilers can operate for up to 1 week at a time without manual intervention.

Currently several hundred systems, larger than domestic systems, are installed in the UK ranging in size from 50kW to the 220MW system installed at a power station. However, the number of installations is increasing rapidly as is the associated design and installation, and operating experience.

On a domestic scale fuel can be supplied as logs or as bags of pellets; above this size fuel has to be delivered by lorry. Woodchips are best delivered by tipping into a silo although they can be tipped into a trough from which they are blown into a silo. Wood pellets can be tipped or blown from the delivery vehicle, with specialist pellet delivery vehicles equipped with fans for this purpose. While other delivery methods are possible they are either slow or have health and safety implications, and are not recommended.

Fuel on a domestic scale, which is manually handled into a boiler feed hopper, can be stored in any dry shed or building. Most automatically fed boilers require a fuel silo attached to the boiler house, this silo requiring access for a delivery vehicle. Depending on the manner of delivery, discussed in the answer above, the vehicle will need to tip into the silo or fuel will need to be blown into the silo. In the case of blown fuel the silo does not necessarily need to be on the outside of the building and, in the case of pellets, fuel can be blown up to 20m from the delivery vehicle. On the smallest automatic pellet boilers, fuel be stored some distance from the boiler and extracted from the silo and delivered to the boiler by a vacuum conveying system. Finally, containerised silos are available where fuel is delivered in the container which forms the fuel store and is coupled up to the fuel extract mechanism on delivery.