Pellet Stoves

[GIO]

I may be buying a place out in the country. Would you go with a pellet stove/heater or traditional wood burner. I am not much for chopping wood but I wondered if the pellet deal works when the power goes out? any thoughts?

[diablodawg]

Wood is more work, but potentially way cheaper. Besides, it guarantees exercise- what's not to like about that. Pellets are alright, but always seemed kinda weird and fake to me.

[M ammo]

You always have to buy pellets,

You can get wood, for a stove in a variety of ways. Places and prices.

Or get s good wood stove and retrofit it with a gas burner.

No chopping and it give you multi fuel capability.

Sounds like a subject to Goggle, Mother Earth News, Pellet Stove,

They have lots of good info on those subjects

Jim M ammo

[Hairtrigger]

I use a pellet/corn stove. It has saved me over $125 a month on my propane bill after buying the corn in my old farm house.

The stove must have 110V to burn. If the power goes out the heat will stop in a reasonable time. The stove has both a draft fan and a room fan.

The corn smells very nice, like a light caramel popcorn but you quickly get immune to it and nolonger notice. The wood pellets burn incredibly clean with very little ash to remove or maintenance.

My stove is the kind that is free standing and looks like a wood stove

[h2osport]

I have had the displeasure of being around 3 pellet stoves, and I would not put on in my house. Quality of pellets has a lot to do with how they run. All three of the ones I have been around have needed some pretty serious mods to make them work right.

Randy

[hitman]

Friend of mine has one that will burn either straight wood or pellets.

Requires power to run the feeder (for pellets) and fan.

[GIO]

Thanks everyone

[bikerburgess]

I love pellet stoves I have had 2 over the years the one I have now has a built in battery back up and will run 12 hr on the battery or it can be changed out for a larger rv marine battery that could go days. I would get rid of the regular wood stove in my living room for a pellet one but my wife likes the wood burner for that room

[kimel]

I heat entirely with a pellet stove. Runs just fine as long as I use high quality pellets (Lignetics or Armstrong being my preferred brands). I have it on a small (750KVA) UPS device that serves to filter the power to the control board (solid state logic) and keeps it running long enough for me to get my small generator going.

We used to heat entirely with wood. Only problem was we had a lot of time with a cool to cold house. Go to work all day and come home to a cold house = not fun.

Pellets aren't nearly the deal they were when I got my stove 7 years ago though. I was paying about $80/ton then. This year it was $230/ton. Still WAY cheaper than using the electric forced air furnace. We burn not quite 4 ton a year but that depends a lot on what kind of winter we have, how much we are home (we run the house cooler when we are not here) and so on.

Still have the wood stove so if pellets got hard to get it would take me about an hour to move that back in from the shop and I still have a couple cord of wood split and stacked I use to heat the shop.

Heating with wood is messy. Heating with pellets is by no means clean but it is better than wood. If you or your wife is a neat freak that can't stand dust then you should stay away from either heat source.

[oddjob]

On my second one.........They are wonderful......power goes out.... they do stop..........but it works great for my family. My wife considers it the Dillon 1050 of the house!

[Chills1994]

I was just at a wood stove/pellet stove store yesterday. Yes there is a power cord that comes out of the back of the pellet stove. So I just had to ask, "If the power goes out, does it stop running?" And the salesman replied with, "You can get a battery back up for it. It uses something like a deep cycle marine or boat battery."

And, yeah, the guy did mention you could use corn kernels to feed it too.

I am thinking that the downside to having just a wood stove is all the work that is involved with them, buying a chainsaw (keeping that sharpened and running), buying a logsplitter, creating a nice overhead free from the weather/rain storage area for the wood, then letting it dry for a while (a year or more).

slight thread drift here... I think it was about 4 or 5 years back here on this forum, I asked about a good way to reduce the leaves in my yard. I have always wondered about the possibility of using chopped up or ground up leaves for fuel. I suppose that somehwere out there on the web some Forest Products Laboratory has published how many BTU's could be extracted out of X pounds of dried leaves.

Around here what seems to be catching on are "wood burners". They look like metal sheds that sit outside in the backyard. You burn regular cord wood in them, and water circulates through them to get pumped back into the house. Then I guess it kinda goes through some like your A-coil where air is forced through it and then onto the rest of the house. Of course, if you had the pex tubing ran through your floor (concrete) or under your subfloor for radiant heating that would probably be ideal.

[Hairtrigger]

When I was considering the pellet vs wood stove purchase I kept going to the thought of the fact I have always had mice in the wood pile. With my corn/pellet stove the fuel is kept in a metal bin and we have not had any rodent issues. I had the metal bin modified so I can put a 5 gallon bucket under the bin and fill it in 20-30 seconds with no spills

[Graham Smith]

A friend has one in the basement of his old house. It draws air from the outside and vents out through a double pipe system in his old fireplace and he has some kind of passive air circulation rigged up to spread the heat. He buys a load of pellets in the spring/summer for use the following year. It's set up to run at a continuous low level and keeps that house around 63° all winter. He then uses a small very efficient electric oil radiant heater in his den and office.

He spent quite a bit of money and work on this setup but it was basically paid for after three years. He is now using the savings to beef up the insulation throughout the house.

[fuzzysights]

If the home building industry does not pick up you can expect to pay significantly more for pellets since they are mostly made from the sawdust from sawmills. Since lumber production is down so much right now there is not much "waste" sawdust available so the price will go up. Pellet stoves do require power. You might look at a small european designed wood stove that has considerable heat sink mass. Once you get them going they radiate for hours and use a small amount of wood. If you have access to firewood in your area you might compare the prices for wood vs pellets now. Many former loggers have turned to selling firewood in this down economy and the price of firewood has stabilized.