Inside our boiler room: how a liquid fuel boiler now runs on pellets

Your boiler was built for paraffin, diesel or HFO. It can't burn wood pellets until it's converted. In our test facility in Gqeberha, we did exactly that: a boiler built for paraffin now runs on pellets.

Jodé Fourie designed and built the burner with Louié Maas. In the video below, he walks you through it.

What's in the room

Inside is the converted boiler, with our 1 MW EcoFlame burner bolted on, running on 8 mm pellets from Coega Biomass Centre. A 1-cube hopper holds about 800 kg.

All the changes happen on our side

We measure the flange your boiler needs before we arrive. Then we laser cut, weld and paint it in our workshop in Gqeberha. On site, the burner goes on and your boiler stays as it is.

"When we get onto site, we can really just slide the burner in and you're ready to rock," says Jodé.

You're running on pellets within a day.

It regulates itself, and you see the numbers

The burner is PLC controlled. Its fans and motors adjust themselves to your boiler pressure. Running a dryer or a bakery oven instead? Then it regulates on temperature.

Your operator sees pressure, feed rate, fuel used and stack temperature on a touch screen. The same data goes to our cloud server, and you get a monthly report on uptime and fuel use. So you can see how well your boiler, and our burner, are doing.

The fuel behind it

The pellets come from Coega Biomass Centre and are tested to EN ISO 17225-2:2021 (industrial grade I2): about 17 MJ/kg, under 10% moisture, under 1.5% ash and over 98% durability. Switching to them from diesel, paraffin or HFO cuts lifecycle emissions by about 80%, according to an independent assessment by Control Union.

• 17MJ/kg
• <10%moisture
• <1.5%ash
• >98%durability

See it for yourself

We showed this boiler to more than 60 guests at our Coffee Morning on 14 October. Read the recap