I have used American Wood Fibers pellets before, but they were the hard wood version. The “White Pine” pellet is a new thing to me. The AWF hardwood pellets are a good pellet themselves, along the lines of a Hamer. The AWF white pine pellets say on the bag “ultra premium” for which there is no such official PFI rating (although one has been considered), but if there was such a rating (which I wish there was) I believe these pellets would indeed qualify.
Contrary to conventional wisdom softwood pellets are among some of the best out there. The AWF white pine pellet is an excellent example of how good a softwood pellet can be. These have noticeably increased heat output over even the best hard wood pellet. The actual pellet is a very light tan color, and pellet length is very short, but consistent. The bags had an average amount of fines.
Because of the smaller pellet length these pellets will feed very well in just about all feed styles. Because of their small pellet length in may appear in stoves with fixed feed rates (which is most of them) that they are putting out even more BTUs than they actually are compared to other pellets. The reason being that one turn of the auger delivers more pellet because the shorter length.
Although the increased BTU output is exaggerated by the small pellet size, these pellets likely put out around 400 BTUs more than an equivelant hard wood pellet. What I found amusing was the sales guy where I bought these was trying to tell me that they were dramatically higher output than hardwood pellets. The truth is the majority of pellets on the market are in the 7500-8500 BTU range. My unofficial educated guess is these AWF pellets could be pushing or exceeding the top of that range. That is not that dramatic, and probably only makes up for the AWF white pine premium cost.
Besides good heat output these pellet leave a very light ash, and not a lot of it. I did not observe any clinkers in my stove from these pellets.
I can give these pellets a strong recommendation. The cost a little more than some other pellets, but if you want a hassle free pellet this your pellet. The challenge is they are hard to find, and AWF at the time of this review does not even mention them on their web site.
We found a dewalt folding knife in the hopper of our pellet stove. Headless to say the stove isn’t working anymore. Not sure how a folding knife got into a bag of pellets. Hoping you can explain that to us. We purchased 2 tons of your pellets fromEllington Agway and we have made them aware of the issue.