Market Not The Only Thing Cold
Housing Bust Consequence #2,549:
Jeff Hadden hates to say he told you so, but he's going to do it anyway. The owner of NPC Firewood, a Sacramento firewood seller since 1971, Hadden recalls customers trading their traditional wood burning stoves for pellet stoves a little more than a decade ago. Lured by the ease of fitting pellets -- compacted balls of sawdust -- into a stove rather than more cumbersome firewood, Hadden said consumers started moving to the new technology in droves. "I've been telling them for 14 years that they would be sorry," Hadden said.More at sacbee.com...
And sorry many people are, since a recent shortage in pellets, caused by a slowdown in home construction, has left many in the region shivering as temperatures dip below normal.
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Craig Franklin, the general manager of Emigh Ace Hardware on El Camino Avenue, said he feels sorry for anyone relying solely on pellets to stay warm this winter. "We sold everything we can get our hands on," Franklin said. "I don't see an end (to the shortage) as long as the weather stays cold."
Franklin said he's heard that a slump in new home construction has kept his suppliers from keeping pace with demand. "Since the residential housing market has gone in the tank and they're not building enough stuff, there's not enough raw material," Franklin said.
6 comments:
Lander- I vote you make the next round of bubble T-shirts and make sure there is one that says: Got Pellets?!?!?! ;-)
article doesn't make sense.
article doesn't make sense.
Sure it does. Wood pellets are made from sawdust. Sawdust comes from saw mills that cut lumber for houses.
Why would sawdust become scarce?
"And sorry many people are, since a recent shortage in pellets, caused by a slowdown in home construction, has left many in the region shivering as temperatures dip below normal".
So a slowdown in housing has caused a shortage in pellets? They are not cutting as much lumber thus produceing less sawdust for chips. Believe me this is total nonsense.You do not have to cut lumber to make these chips.There is pleunty of wood biomass out there from logging waste and vegetation management practices. Semis haul large truckloads of these chips created from forest management practices to buyers everyday.The trucks drive on a hydraulic ramp and the whole truck is lifted in the air vertically thus allowing the chips to fall out of the truck.These chips are often ground up in the forest and then hauled to buyers.Actually a lot of these chips are used to create electricity through cogeneration.Wheelebrator is a big company that does this.They have a plant in anderson california near redding.A lot of times wood biomass is burned in the forest because it doesn't pay to haul it to a market.It is ridiculous to say a housing slowdown is causeing a scarcity of wood biomass needed for pellets.There is something more to this story.
Perhaps the problem is not just a shortage -- if there's not as much sawdust available to make the pellets, they're probably getting more expensive as well.
Pellet stoves?
Nobody ever thought of making a multi-fuel stove that can burn both pellets and regular wood?
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