Wood pellet bedding newbie - which brand?

little_flea

little_flea

Well-Known Member
Joined
13 September 2007
Messages
3,339
Location
London (but Swedish)
Visit site
My very wet mare is slowly driving me into financial ruin by using bags and bags of very expensive shavings every week, so now considering wood pellet bedding which I've never used before.

Which brand is the best/most cost effective? How does it work for very wet horses? What would you say the average cost works out at?

Any comments appreciated!
 
i recently tried wood pellets - never again!

from what i have read however, it seems that the best brand is the Liverpool wood pellets.

i tried white horse bedding, the companies service was good, but i will never try pellets again!
 
I use stovies (located in Scotland). I love them, have been using them since last winter. Makes my life sooooo much easier and I have a seriously wet pee-pot of a gelding - and what a difference it makes to his stable!
 
liverpool wood pellets were the cheapest when I was looking.
Moved mine from cardboard onto LWP deep bed on rubber mats and so far so good .
 
Manco in East Yorks have been the cheapest and best for me. They were far cheaper than Liverpool.

One bit of advice is to order them as if for burning use, so you only pay the 5% VAT rather than 17.5% that is payable on them for bedding. Some people will tell you they are different pellets, but they aren't. No sane company would go to the expense of different production for two products that are sold at different VAT rates yet are the same, would they? So paying extra VAT is just madness.

I've even used the virgin wood briquettes (which I sell in my shop anyway) when I ran out of pellets. They worked just as well but took ages to soak.
 
I've had Liverpool, but didn't rate them. They may have changed but they were dark when I had them and didn't work at all well. I am very happy with Corley Biowood and their service is far superior to LWP.
 
Do you have rubber mats?

I have a manky, pretty wet mare too. I have recently been trying the addition of dry wood pellets into her shavings bed. Not a huge amount, just scattering a few scoops of them across her bed and then mixing in with the shavings.

They are hugely absorbant, so soak up more more wet than shavings and seem to contain the wee patches in one area better than shavings alone. When I scoop out the wet patches in the morning, the mats are just "damp", not "wet" which they are when just using shavings.

I only use a thin layer of shavings/pellets across the back 1/3 of her stable (just enough to cover the mats, not a thick "nest"! ;) ) and take out all muck/wet bedding each morning, sweep, then reset the dry bedding/top up with fresh shavings/pellets. Takes about 15mins to do and I go through less than one big bale shavings per week and less than one 15kg bag of Stovies.

Only been doing this a couple of weeks, but it seems to be working pretty well.

YO says someone on the yard used wood pellets only as a deep litter bed previously and it was really dusty and horrid as a deep litter bed. I've no personal experience with it as deep litter or on it's own though.
 
I've deep littered with Stovies, but to be fair, every second week I'd top it up with a bag of shavings as it makes a nicer, fluffier bed this way. But so effective in keepign a wet horse's bed dryer, and keeping the smell down as well!
 
Used them in a deep litter shavings bed by digging a hole in the area that they pee put a bag of pellets in the hole then cover with shavings ,repeat this as necessary bed kept nice and dry and you only have to remove the droppings !
 
Think I'm going to try mixing the pellets in with my shavings as Casper is wetter than ever this year - I was going to wet the pellets first but would I be better just scattering the dry ones then?
 
Yes, you can scatter them about or do like I sometimes do, dig out the wet patch, fill in with unsoaked pellets, then cover with shavings. As they get wet, they do expand - so you may need to take your fork and re-level it now and again, or you end up with a mound just there!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top