A little while ago I wrote about how I have been trying wood pellet bedding for Scottie after haven fallen out of love slightly with cardboard. Two months on and haven chosen a brand to go with, it is safe to say I am well and truly sold! I have been using White Horse Energy Premium Wood Pellets for over a month now and they have been great. Scottie’s bed has never been so clean and easy to muck out. During the week I literally just scoop all the poo off the top and I am done!
How to use wood pellet bedding
Everyone seems to have a preferred way of using wood pellet bedding and I have been experimenting quite a bit over the past two months to decide what works best for me. Once I had my bulk delivery of White Horse Energy, I put about 7 bags in, to create a nice deep bed with banks to start with. I soaked these bags, cutting them open and pouring about half a bucket of water in each, slightly more in the bags being used as banks. I then left these for a good 20mins before emptying them out into my stable and building my bed.
It can be tempting to fiddle around with your bed for the next few days, but I find the best thing to do is only take the poo out for the first few days to allow it all to settle. But after that it really depends on how you want to manage your bed. What I find works best for me is to only take wet out once a week. So most days all I do is take the poo out and tidy up the surface. Once the poo is all out, I will gently mix the surface all together. Not only does this help you find any small bits of poo you might have missed, but it also mixes any clean, dry bedding with any loose, slightly dirty bedding, helping the dryer areas of the bed settle.
Once a week, usually on a Saturday, I scoop all the loose surface bedding into the banks and will dig up an area of wet. I try not to take out too much wet at a time as this disrupts the whole bed and you are almost back at square one again. So I aim to take out about 1-2foot square each week. Scottie typically wees to the left and middle of his bed, so I rotate what parts I take out. For example, one week I will take out the far left, the next I will take out slightly to the right of that and the middle the following week. I then start the cycle again. This seems to be working really well, although if he has been weeing more in one place than another I will dig that section out instead.
After I have dug the wet out, I sprinkle a little EquiFresh down to help combat any ammonia what might have built up. But to be honest, I rarely smell anything, the pellets are so absorbent. I have been replacing with 1 dry bag of wood pellets. I just pour it straight into the hole I have dug out and smooth over. I dig soak it at the start, but when digging out and replacing wet patches, I find putting a dry bag in much more effective. So far I have only been putting in 1 bag a week with a second soaked bag once every 3-4 weeks to keep the banks topped up. This makes it about £8 a week cheaper than what I was paying to keep my cardboard bed.
Bulk buying wood pellet bedding
One of the best things about wood pellet bedding is that they come in small bags, making it easy to bulk buy them. Not only does bulk buying mean less trips to the feed store or less deliveries to organise, but it often works out a lot cheaper. I was able to order 65 x 15kg bags of White Horse Energy premium wood pellets. Even with putting in 7 bags at the start, at the rate I am currently using them, this should be a years worth of bedding! It came on one pallet and is tucked away at the back of our bedding shed, taking up considerably less room than the shavings bales what need to be replaced every month or so.
Buying them in this bulk meant I paid just £4.20 per bag. My local horse shops cost anything from £5-£8 for a single bag of wood pellets. And while it was a big initial cost of around £270, White Horse Energy offer PayPal 3-in-1. This means you can split the payment into 3 smaller payments completely interest free! This is what I did and while it could have easily gone on a credit card, it’s nice not having to pay interest on it and still get it straight away.
Wood pellet bedding delivery
Delivery is quick and FREE! You can pay more for specific days or quicker delivery. But standard delivery should be with you within a week unless you have pre ordered. The only potential issue is, they don’t have forklifts on the lorries, but small electric trolleys. So there are limitations on where they can put your bedding if you don’t have a flat concrete yard. This wasn’t a huge problem for me, they were able to drop it off on our slightly gravelly car park, but they couldn’t move it anywhere from that spot. It would be great to have a forklift delivery option, I would pay extra for this if it meant they could put it straight in our shed.
Wood pellet bedding discount
I love my wood pellets from White Horse Energy and if you are considering trying wood pellet bedding I can highly recommend them. I think they make a lovely bed and the delivery, bulk and payment options were huge selling points for me. But if you still aren’t 100% sold, I also have a 5% off code for you! This can work for the PayPal 3-in-1 scheme too!
Code: RUBBUT50489
Last Updated on 14/01/2022
