Softwood pellets burn hotter and cleaner....
sigh, OK I cant resist and have to chime in (putting my marketing hat on):
pellets are a (somewhat) standardized commodity (fuel). Do you discuss if the gas from Citgo is better than the one from say Exxon ? No because within the legal limits they are exactly the same and hence have the same price (lots of price pressure makes it so). Now of course they try to suggest one or the other is better for your car and burns cleaner....in the absence of any other distinnguishable feature thats a nice marketing effort...
On the other side of the spectrum is the knowledge people have about fire and wood and stoves....hardwood is better than softwood...everyone knows that much.
Now, wood pellets have a stadard in diameter, they tell you the BTU output (in more or les accurate terms) and the ash content (usually fairly accurate if stated at all) - unfortunatly a coarse grading was accepted a while back putting pellets in categories of premium, super premium ect...which does not help terribly much other than to weed out the terribles from the reasonables. Where the fiber comes from is fairly useless information.
Now back to the top argument, if you want to distinguish your product from all the others, maybe you can somehow convince people that softwood is better than hardwood for pellets ? Wouldn't that be cool ? You could sell your hardwood for premium dollar to the wood stove folks and the softwood (as pellet) to the pellet stove folks....mission accomplished.
Of course it gets more complicated, because the length of the pellet is not standardized (has a rather big variable that is), so indeed short pellets with the same BTU than long pellets appear hotter for the enduser because the stove auger delivers more material per time and burns more pellets per time...hence any pellet 'test' that is not testing the burn time in a home setting is rather useless compared to BTU. Unfortunatly even the BTU is usually given with a 10-15 % varience by the vendor...and one gets the impression that some of the box store pellets are sometimes consistantly shorter than some brand product....I wonder why that is
And now throw on top that every wood pellet stove has a different air intake and settig and burning wood can range from a too much air to not enough air and cause all kinds of changes to the ash measure, heat output, effort in cleaning, long term damage to the stove, chimney cleaning need ect.....and you end up with a product that people discuss like we do...
The only winner in such a market is the vendor(s) not the consumer, because the pricing is removed from the function of the commodity (heat output) and you end up with the 'same' product costing everythig from 150 USD to 350 USD/ton....that sucks.
There is, now I feel much better. And hopefully this discussion forum helps people navigate this market better than they could all on their own. Glad to be back in 'heating season', we had way too much sun lately....