Wood is a very versatile fuel and can be burned in many different forms to provide central heating. Until recently wood fuelled heating has had the drawback of a lack of controllability. Automatic wood fuelled boilers overcome this problem by utilising thermostats which automatically control fuel and air intake with very responsive and programmable temperature settings. 

Systems that use wood chip tend to be larger than their pellet counterparts as they must be engineered to use a fairly variable fuel. However, in both cases good fuel will produce only 1kg of ash per tonne of fuel burnt. As it comprises only clean timber, the ash may be spread on any garden as a fertiliser.

There are many domestic scale log, wood chip and wood pellet burning central heating boilers available. Log boilers require manual loading and as such may be unsuitable for some situations while automatic pellet and wood-chip systems tend to be more expensive but can be set to run automatically. These are automatic systems are more suited to today’s lifestyle and therefore only these such systems will be considered further.