Jo's story

The first time Jo & Kylie ever fired up a pellet fire was on a cold May day in 2009. And their life hasn't been the same since. Within a month, Jo had quit his job and approached the owner of Firemakers to demanded he be the rep for his local region. "I knew it was the right time and the right product for the consumer, the country, and the environment," says Jo, in perfect true-believer fashion.

What convinced him was discovering that a pellet fire could heat their entire 200 square-metre open-planned beach house for less than $120 a month. (They paid up to $200 with gas.) And all that without releasing tones of emissions into the night sky.

Skeptical at first, Jo and Kylie didn't trust that his low-emissions Parkwood pellet fire could heat such a large area without any help. So they also switched on the heat-pump at the other end of the house, just in case. The heat-pump experiment lasted two days - it was just too hot!

Jo (now Firemaker's regional representative for Parkwood Fires for the top of the South Island in New Zealand) might be an extreme example of a Firemakers customer, but a lot of other homeowners share his enthusiasm for clean home heating.

Perhaps it's because of the energy savings these fires provide, or the fact that they offer an environmentally sustainable heating option. What we know for sure is that the time for action on global warming is now and we can all make a positive impact through the choices we make when we build or renovate our homes. And with Firemaker's range of products, you won't be sacrificing style or ambience while you do it.

Good for you and good for the environment

Pellet fuel is an ideal fuel source for a number of reasons:

• Pellets are made from untreated sawdust, which is a waste product of New Zealand's substantial sawmilling industry. This sawdust comes from managed forests that could otherwise be dumped in landfills to generate CO₂ and methane as it decomposes.
• Choosing pellet fuel over traditional cut wood as a fuel source means that fewer trees are removed from the environment to heat our homes.
• Wood pellets deliver a cleaner burn than coal or wood and meets the highest New Zealand emission standards at well under one gram of emissions for every kilogram of pellets burnt. Pellet fires generate no visible smoke.
• Pellet fuel is generally carbon neutral, because burning wood is a carbon-neutral process. Any CO₂ released is equal to the amount released when a tree decomposes. New managed forests will absorb this CO₂ as they regrow.