Eco-Flame

Towards the end of last year I was approached by the folks at confluence energy about reviewing their pellets. They are planning on shipping to the northeast and had noticed my blog on pellets and wanted me to review them. I got the bag of pellets around the middle of spring last year, and it is finally gotten cold enough to give them a fair test. There are a few things about these pellets that are different than ones us folks in the Northeast are used to. The first is that they are soft wood pellets. Eventually I will do a more extensive article on soft wood pellets versus hardwood pellets, but let me just say a high quality soft wood pellet can burn as well as any hardwood pellet, and potentially have more BTU's per pound. One of the other interesting things about these particular pellets are they are from Colorado, and they are shipping them to areas in the northeast where pellet prices are high. With pellet prices at nearly $300 a ton I am figuring that their business model can work shipping all the way to the northeast, if and when pellet prices drop down below $200 a ton I believe it may be difficult for the folks at confluence energy to compete here in the Northeast. The other interesting part of their business model is that there wood comes from trees that have been killed by beatles. Unlike many of the pellet plants in the northeast that rely on production factories waste sawdust; these guys have a wood source that is not dependent on the economy or output production of lumber using industries. ie: They are not buying saw dust at premium prices.

Okay enough about the company and on to the actual pellets. The name of these pellets is a "Eco-Flame", and the first thing I noticed was there was very little in the way of fines in this bag of pallets. I believe that is worth mentioning because these pellets came to me via UPS, and if you know anything about UPS I very well could have received a bag of saw dust. They have no binding agents added, but either their process or the nature of the wood result in virtually no fines. Because these are soft wood pellets they also have a different odor, they basically smell like pine lumber. When they burn I would say the odor is a little sharper than typical hard wood pellets, but not any stronger. It basically smells like pine burning. The pellets burned very bright and had very little ash. Because I did not burn a lot of these I cannot speak fairly to the clinker issue, but from what I could tell from what was left in the burned pot I would not anticipate clinkers to be a big issue. From my sample this seemed to be was a very fine pellet. If they were being sold in my area I would try a ton of them without reservation.

*As a matter of full disclosure I need to say that confluence energy sent me a sample to try. Because I did not buy them off the shelf I can not be entirely certain that the sample I had is an absolute reflection of the average pellets that confluence energy will produce. They sent me some of their testing data and their ash content ranged from .7% to .3%, I would suggest that the bag I had was closer to the .3% mark. It seems like they have a pretty consistent source of wood, so I would expect the quality to be pretty consistent as well.