who's using woodfuel?

Woodfuel pioneers in the Cairngorms National Park include Jamie and Cathryn Williamson from Alvie Estate who have installed a woodchip hot water and heating system in Alvie House.

Using wood instead of oil to heat this traditionally built shooting lodge, which sleeps 44 people, has proved very effective as well as saving the estate tens of thousands of pounds a year.

"Even when oil was half the price it is now, it was costing us £20,000 a year to heat the place. We were using 60,000 litres a year, which is a lot of oil!" said Cathryn. "We're now using about £10,000 worth of wood chips produced here on the estate.

"However I have to admit I was a little bit unsure about whether the wood chip system would actually work in an old house like ours. For some reason I had it in my head that it was going to be hugely labour intensive, with someone having to constantly be feeding these great big flames!

"in reality it's much less dramatic. There's this thing called an auger that feeds in the chips automatically, so all that you need to do is get the hopper filled up - how often you have to do that depends on the time of year."

Cathryn and the team who run the house have been amazed at the efficiency of the system and the amount of hot water it produces. "Even when we have a houseful of guests having baths and showers, the hot water keeps flowing," she said.

"I was also really surprised at how much little ash is produced - an auger takes the ash out of the system and it falls into a traditional sized metal distbin which only needs emptied once every couple of weeks."

Alvie Estate has now installed a woodchip system to heat the toilet block and showers at Dalraddy campsite, and a further system is planned for Alvie Manse.

Click here for further details and facts and figures about the woodfuel system at Alvie House.