Pellet Boiler incentives and/or tax breaks for domestic houses

Have a Google. There is plenty of information on it

There were government incentives of about €4,500 for pellet boilers circa 15 years ago. Many put them in and found them troublesome / temperamental. The price of pellets also got very expensive.

If I had ready access to solid fuel, I would consider a solid fuel boiler heating a large buffer tank. You could pick up a good used 40-50KW pellet boiler for about €500 and convert it to burn solid fuel.

Has there been great advances in the overall reliability in the last 15 years? Is it significantly more viable? What has changed?

The difficulties weren’t in emptying an ash pan. There was a considerable degree of maintenance, cleaning and general minding to keep them operational. This coupled with the cost, boiler space requirements, multi tonne pellet storage requirements, the general need for some kind of buffer tank or thermal store was quick to quench most peoples enthusiasm.

Home heating oil is in a suddenly very volatile situation at the moment, but over the last number of years, the pellet price offered little saving per KWH vs oil and boiler solutions wouldn’t have the same efficiency either.

I would think carefully before going down this road. There is a reason they never took off.

Per SEAI, the price per kWH of heating for wood pellets is as low as 4.9c, while oil at the end of 2021 was 9.2c, and has increased significant since then.

A proper wood pellet boiler and its support equipment is not cheap, but for existing Irish homes with the space, they are infinitely better than the Green Party's proposed "Heat Pumps for everyone" solution. Can you imaging running a Heat Pump in any house built here before 2020??

I have a 96% efficient Oil boiler at the moment, when this is no longer viable I'll be putting in a Wood Pellet system (if I can find a decent installer here amongst all the cowboys). My own personal experience in Germany is that a Wood Pellet system is second to none.

I know a fair few people that got them put in. Not one of them would ever go pellets again.

Thats tells me all I need to know. :)

Why would you see the heat pump as been unsuitable? With the benefit of off-peak electricity the KWH price will easily beat that which you have quoted for pellet.

Sure older houses presumably with less insulation will take more energy to heat, but that is true of any energy source.

Homes have to be super insulated and air tight for heat pumps to work effectively, especially in our winter.

There's a difference though that I'm not making clear enough.

A heat pump system will never get a poorly insulated house warm to begin with. You can run a traditional system and get the house warm, although a poorly insulated one will cool soon after.

With the heat pump you will never get a comfortable temp.

Our house had a wood pellet boiler installed by the previous owners. Not only would I not ever get one again, the guy that made his living servicing them said "I would tell anyone to get rid of them and get oil or gas instead". They are a nightmare, painful to run, very inefficient, very few people service them, very expensive in maintenance and running costs, and best of all they are seriously ecologically unsound.

1. "Green energy"
   1. Wood pellets took off in industrial use in Germany in the 60's and 70's when the material used for wood pellets was a waste product from other industries, and effectively "free". By the time the rest of residential world was getting on board, all that material was used for flat-pack furniture and now there is no "waste" material for recycling into pellets.
   2. This means that your wood pellets come from new fast-growth evergreen trees which do not soak up much carbon in their short lifetime and also contribute to the serious ecological issue of monoculture forestation, loss of habitat, soil destruction, etc.
   3. Your new growth evergreens now need to be cut down (oil use), stripped of leaves, bark and branches (oil use), transported to processing (oil use), processed (oil use and whatever is generating the electricity), put in plastic bags (oil use), trucked to a distribution centre (oil use), then trucked to your house (oil use).
   4. Now, you have to burn the pellets at (if you're lucky) 50-60% efficiency.
   5. At the end of all this you've burned up a huge amount of oil getting the pellets to your house, at which point you've inefficiently burned the pellets, thus probably contributing as much carbon as if you were just using existing mains gas. You have a tiny offset of the small amount of carbon soaked up by fast growth evergreens a few years old.
2. "cleaning out an ash pan"
   1. Maintenance on these things is h-o-r-r-i-f-i-c .
   2. Firstly you have the ash disposal problem. Not only is the ash in a pan, like a normal fire, it is also inside the vents and chimney. Unlike a normal fire, you'll have to vacuum out those vents and chimneys several times a year. Like, every month.
   3. Next you have the non-ash problem - tar and other bitumens. If your **** wood pellet boiler isn't exactly in its operating window, or more likely the batch of pellets you just bought for hundreds of euro is of slightly different composition, guess what?
      1. The insides of your boiler are now caked in a glossy, impossible to remove layer of tar and bitumen.
      2. So are your chimneys and vents.
      3. This affects the already crappy efficiency of the boiler, reduces your heat generation, and creates a serious maintenance problem.
3. The **** Auger.
   1. The godddammed, motherfucking, piece of absolute ****, auger.
   2. You will be unsticking this every week. Or every other day. Or multiple times a day.
      1. Because it's just coming up to its maintenance window.
      2. Because it's getting worn.
      3. Or there is one pellet which is just a little thinner, or half broken, and is stuck between the auger and the housing, because the tolerances on these machines is ****.
      4. Or, best of all, the 1 ton load of pellets you just bought is of slightly different composition to the last load, and is getting stuck because it's damper.
      5. Or, the weather has changed, and the pellets have got a tiny little bit damper. Not wet, not anything you'd feel, but they've just swollen.
      6. Or shrunk because it's hotter. That's also a thing.
      7. Oh you've got a suction system? That's great, that won't ever get clogged or blocked at all. Say, are you in the market for a bridge? Because I've got an old one from Brooklyn if you're interested.
4. Hope you like waiting
   1. You know when there's a cold snap and you like to put the heating on? Well, hope you like being cold. Because you'll be waiting 45 minutes for this piece of **** to start actually generating regular amounts of heat once it starts mumbling those expensive pellets through its maw.
5. Money
   1. Pellets cost a fortune. And because your boiler is very inefficient, you'll be using a lot of them.
   2. And as your boiler gets older, and things like tar and general wear come into effect, you'll be buying even more of them.
   3. Unlike a gas or oil boiler, these things aren't cheap. Like, 10 times the price. And servicing them isn't cheap because not many companies will do them. Because they're a pain in the hole.
   4. You need a humidity controlled area for it. Your coal shed is no good for storing pellets in. Any hint of excess damp, then your pellets, and your boiler (unless the pellets are in a reliably hermetically sealed area in the boiler) are fucked. So you'll be spending money making somewhere suitable for all this **** to go.
   5. You won't be putting one of these inside the house. Not unless you've got a large workshop/garage you're not using. They're big, the pellet storage requires somewhere you can manoeuvre pallets around, and you also have to ventilate.
   6. Our heating bill fell in half when we switched from pellets to gas.

So in summary, they're expensive to put in, expensive to maintain, expensive to run, polluting, a **** nightmare to deal with, a regular source of frustration, and they don't **** work.