Logs are the traditional way to use wood as fuel. Today, there comes the pelletizer or pellet press, along with scores of modern wood log stoves and boilers. Compared with log burning, the pelletizer and pellet press make burning to be higher efficiencies, lower emissions, much greater convenience of use.
Apart from pellets that the pelletizer make, wood chips are the main alternative tree-derived fuel to logs. Medium to large boiler systems tend to use the chips or pellets rather than logs, mainly because these forms of wood fuel are easier to use in fully automated systems. Moreover, by pelletizer, pellets can be made easily at home, all you have to do is purchase a pellet press and glance over the operation handbook.
In domestic properties, or for single rooms, pellet technology is far superior to both wood chip and logs. Chip boilers don't work so well at this small scale. Logs take a lot of human handling, while pellets can be automated even at the smallest scales.The technology for burning logs has certainly improved over the millennia, but they are usually burnt in relatively simple ways: open fires, stoves, stoves with back boilers and dedicated boilers. But advances in pellets have led to the manufacture of pelletizer and pellet press marketed for the larger house or small to medium commercial buildings. Workable automated log supply mechanisms would be very difficult to design and expensive to build, which is perhaps the main reason for the tendency towards using pellets and pelletizer in larger installations.
