I came across this story about a pellet company in Maine that is going to be installing pelletboilers for free and charging only for pellets. There's not a lot of detail. Just wondering if you Mainers know more about it.
I'm curious to see what the per ton price would be for a deal like that. I wonder if the free boiler includes annual maintenance, or if the owner is on their own for that?
Their website. They have a "heat calculator" on their website. I checked it out and it looks like they are tracking their prices with oil prices. If you enter that you're currently paying 3.60/gallon for oil then you'll end up paying roughly $340 a ton according to their "heat calculator." If you're paying 3.90 a gallon for oil you'll end up paying roughly $370 a ton. Their website says save up to 20% on your heating costs by switching from oil to pellets. That 20% savings over oil must be how they are setting their pellet prices and I guess that's impressive if you factor in the fact that you're not paying capital costs for the equipment or install but I saved between 40-45% last year on the boiler that I purchased myself. Their website does not explain many questions I'd have like what equipment they actually use as far as it a furnace. boiler or both, who the manufacturer is, who owns the equipment after it's installed, what does the contract you'll obviously be signing look like, is bulk storage included, etc etc etc It seems like they're only marketing to commercial and municipal customers at the moment. I'm not in the pellet/biomass industry. I'm just a homeowner that made the switch to pellets last year to save some money and so far it's worked out well. However, I have done a lot of research/reading and spoken to a lot of people in the industry and it's struck me that there is a fair amount of people getting into this industry that either don't know what they are doing, are getting into the industry for the wrong reasons, are doing things that are ultimately going to be bad for the industry, or all the above.
