To extend its range of heating and ventilating solutions using renewables, IBD Distribution has been appointed as a distributor for Grant UK wood pellet boilers.

As an environmentally friendly, safe and convenient way of heating the home, they will be a natural complement to IBD's existing ranges of ground and air source heat pumps and solar thermal systems, whilst also providing an energy source for the company's other heating and ventilation solutions.

Using wood pellets as fuel does not just have environmental advantages. The Grant Spira units are fully automatic and use advanced controls to regulate the amount of fuel being delivered so that it precisely matches the heat demand. The Spira also overcomes some of the traditional maintenance issues often associated with wood pellet burners. Its ‘self cleaning’ design reduces the need for cleaning to just once a year under normal running conditions.

IBD has said that it is imperative to provide householders and the installer with innovative green options for home heating whilst also ensuring that installation, operation and maintenance are as effortless as possible. “We feel Grant wood pellet condensing boilers fulfil all these criteria,” said Ian Smith, general manager of IBD Distribution.

The Spira is Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS)-approved and was acknowledged as the Best Renewable Energy Product 2011 by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI).

Single units are available in outputs of 6-26kW with an efficiency of 97.4%, and 9-36kW with an efficiency of 93.1%. They come complete with a pellet store/hopper and feed auger, which automatically supplies the fuel. The output options of the Spira have also been extended to enable installations up to 72kW to be accommodated, utilising two boilers and a central hopper/twin auger arrangement. Models include 12-52kW, 15-62kW and 18-72kW.

In most modern pellet boilers, up to 20% of the energy produced is lost to the atmosphere through waste gases that are exhausted. However, the Spira has a unique secondary condensing heat exchanger which has been designed to capture some of this lost latent heat energy, so it can maintain extremely high efficiency.