Wood Briquettes Not a Log Anymore

Wood briquettes come in a variety of materials, including compressed leaf wood, soft woods such as eucalyptus and Alamo. Other woods offered as wood briquettes are eco wood which is briquettes made of 100 percent pure sawdust. Others contain an oak, birch or beech wood sawdust in the briquettes.

Wood briquettes are used in indoor and outdoor wood burning fireplaces and can also be used anywhere you want to start a fire. Many of them look identical to tree logs, only they are sometimes hollow. They are call ‘bricks’ although they look more like logs.

Wood is unlike any other materials. Metal, steal or plastic can expand with heat, but wood does not expand. Wood is a tissue made of cellulose, resin, starch, sugar derivatives and lignine. Wood looses humidity when the temperature elevates to higher levels and decreases in volume. This is an important property for an inorganic material.  
 
The briquettes or Holzbrikett are compressed at a high pressure briquetting machine and the ligins and resins act as ‘glue’ by softening and this allows the briquettes to maintain their shape, which besides the ‘brick’ are made into round ‘pellets’ often found in school yards under the playground equipment.

In today’s economy, getting rid of your high costing heating oil in exchange for wood burning stoves is very smart. By switching to a wood burning stove you can save between 20 and 60 percent on heating costs because wood costs are lower than oil.

In addition, wood burning units are eco friendly, only emitting the same amount of greenhouse gas or CO2 as the trees absorbed when it was a growing, living thing. So wood burning does not add to global warming.

Wood contains less sulfur when burning than oils do and so fewer sulfates are discharged into the environment. This also means less acid rain and less acid rain in the atmosphere. Wood briquettes are also cleaner than traditional logs so your fireplace and chimney will stay cleaner, longer using them.

When you use wood briquettes, you benefit the forests. Smaller trees need to be thinned out to make room for the larger ones to grow and thrive. These smaller trees are sold to make fuel or paper. Some of the larger trees, eventually, are used for building houses, the furniture trade etc. therefore the forest grows and helps humanity in return. 

Many of the mills who make wood briquettes use a ‘non-waste technology’ in which every part of the wood is used from sawdust to shavings, even the wood residue that is left from some of the grinding. It all gets put back and pressed into the wood briquettes. Others call this a ‘closed production cycle.’

Since wood briquettes burn clean, there is little in the way of ash and after burning them, the remains can be used as a protein fertilizer in gardens, unlike the coal ash.

Since wood contains less sulfur than heating oils do, and is more eco friendly and is not contributing to the greenhouse affect, it makes sense to use wood briquettes in your wood burning stoves.