Finding the right fuel to warm your home can be difficult and getting the best advice can be even harder. Some people prefer wood, while others prefer wood briquettes, but which one should you choose?
Wooden briquettes tend to be cleaner, longer burner, hotter, and more economical than the traditional logs you can purchase. The ability of the briquettes is due to them being dense and dry. Briquettes are made from wood waste product, reducing the waste being sent to landfills.
Benefits of Briquettes
Briquettes offer a host of benefits, including:
- Consistent size, weight, and moisture content
- Dense and dry
- Very easy to handle, store, and stack
- Long burn time with high heat output
- Environmentally friendly, made from wood waste
Benefits of Traditional Logs
Traditional wood also has it’s host of benefits that you will want to know, enabling you to make an informed decision on whether to burn wood or briquettes.
- Available just about anywhere
- Traditional logs can come as seasoned or kiln dried
- Range of sizes, moisture contents, and burning characteristics
- Cost effective
Are Briquettes Better Than Wood?
Home owners have found that wood briquettes tend to be better than logs and there are numerous reasons for this. The reason you will want to consider briquettes rather than traditional wood includes:
Cost Effective in the Long Run
Wood briquettes tend to produce more heat than traditional logs, burning for longer. This makes them more cost effective in the long run. They are able to produce significantly more heat than regular wood, which means you use less briquettes to warm your home, while reducing how many times you need to re-stock your fire. Wooden briquettes have the ability to turn up to eight hours, providing you with a long-lasting burn.
Environmentally Friendly
Wood briquettes are made from one hundred percent wood, a mixture of wood and sawdust are used and compacted to form the briquettes. They are chemical free, sustainably sourced, and they reduce the need to send waste to the landfills. What makes the wooden briquettes popular is their low moisture content, meeting smokeless zone regulations across the UK. With a low moisture content, the briquettes do not produce as much smoke as traditional wood, they also produce less creosote, that can build up in your chimney, increasing the risk of chimney fires.
Cleaner
Wood briquettes produce very little ash, in fact most wooden briquettes only leave around 0.3% of their original size in ash. This saves you time when cleaning your wood burner or fireplace. Due to their clean burn, they cause fewer problems with chimneys and flues, saving you money in the long run.
They produce less mess
Wood briquettes only leave about 0.3% of their original volume as ash. This means you won’t need to clean out the stove as often as you would when using logs as fuel. As wood briquettes burn cleaner than logs, they cause fewer issues with log flumes and chimneys, which again means you’re likely to save money that might otherwise have to go towards hiring a chimney sweep and other maintenance costs.
Less Attendance
Wood briquettes are easy to light and once lit they do not need to be moved around and poked, as you would with traditional wood. They burn for longer and you can leave your fire to heat your home without having to constantly tend to it.
Easy to Handle and Store
Another of the major reasons you should be looking at wooden briquettes rather than traditional wood is that they are easier to handle and store. They are consistent in size and shape, so you can store them with ease in a dry space. They are packages, so you can grab your next batch of briquettes when making a fire. They are lightweight and easy to move from your storage area to your wood burner or fireplace.
In Summary
If you are wondering whether to burn wood or wooden briquettes in your home this winter, briquettes are definitely going to offer you a good value for money solution with their long burn time, ease of lighting, and cleaner burn.
