Pioneer users of newtechnology do seldomattach great importance to
design, service and function. The pioneer pellet household users were
enthusiasts of environmentally friendly heating systems. They invested
their own work into making the system function, and they were highly
tolerant of operational disturbances. Recently, a new kind of user has
emerged in Sweden, as well as in other countries. The use of pellets for
household heating purposes increased by approximately 71% between
the years 2005 and 2010 [1]. These new users want to reduce the cost
of energy, i.e., they aim to improve their heating economy by converting
their heating systems. And they demand maintenance free heating devices.
Since pellet heating competes with district heating and heat
pumps as a source of household heating, it is crucial that the problems
connected with the use of pellets are reduced to a minimum. Therefore,
the pellets delivered to the household user must be of sufficiently high
quality to avoid problems during usage. In a problem inventory that has
been made, it was concluded that crumbled pellets or high amounts of
fines or incorrect equipment set-ups cause most of the problems that
pellet users experience [2].
The term “quality” or “sufficient quality” has to be defined since it is a
broad termwith several possiblemeanings. The concept of quality should
be used with greater care in scientific articles and must be given more
stringent, precise and general definitions. Quality in this context could
be defined either as pellet fulfillment of requirements according to a
standard, such as the SS-EN 14961-1 [3], or it could be determined by
the requirements of the household pellet users. The latter is important,
since household users are quality conscious. In this work, the term quality
is correlated to the fulfillment of standard parameter requirements.