In an attempt to heat my drafty old farmhouse this winter, I’m thinking of investing in a corn or wood pellet stove. I live in Middle Tennessee, and we don’t have what could rightly be called a winter here. The temps rarely get into the mid-low twenties, and a couple days per year into the the teens or single digits. Mostly I’d guess it hovers in the low thirties. Currently I heat with two propane heaters, clsoing off all but two rooms of the house. Even so, last year I used about 100 gallons of propane per month.
I’ve insulated part of the house and plan to insulate more this summer, and I’ve put storm windows on the 160-year old windows. I should probably recaulk around them. Are there any other relatively inexpense energy-saving things I could be doing?
Now, to the stove idea. I heat about 800 sq ft in the winter. I like the idea of pellets (or corn) in part because I don’t think you can keep a woodstove going for a 12-hour workday without feeding the stove, and the pellet stoves have a hoppers that feed the stove. Can anyone give me their feedback? How much do the pellets cost? Since my climate is so moderate, how much fuel would I use? Are the stoves as dirty as a fireplace? In fact, can I just get an insert to put in one of my existing fireplaces? I would assume the stoves have blowers, right? Will they still radiate heat if there’s a power outage?
I have a multi-fuel stove. I’ve used pellets, cherry pits, and corn in it. Pellets, by far, are the best in terms of most heat generated with the least soot and fly ash.
Corn has to be selected for proper moisture content and mixed with chicken scratch in order to avoid clinker formation. You can’t use just any corn and get good results. You also have to adjust the auger to feed it into the stove at a higher rate than the wood pellets because it doesn’t burn as hot.
Cherry pits burn hotter than the corn, but not as hot as the pellets.
Every few days, you have to let the stove burn out and clean it We’re talking about the burn chamber and heat exchangers here. Fly ash accumulates and the stove dramatically loses efficiency. A shop vac is the best, if not in fact only, tool for this job.
There are models that have battery back-up for the auger and blowers, but if you don’t get one of those the stove will be useless during a power outage. They use forced air combustion.
I use mine to heat my basement rec room during the winter. I cut vents into the ceiling heat runs, so I get enough hot air circulating through the rest of the house by convection that the furnace kicks on only when it gets really cold.
I should also mention that although you don’t have to babysit one like you do a woodstove, you don’t get to just light it and walk away from it either. It takes some time to get the fuel feed rate and blower speed adjusted correctly for whatever fuel you are using. It’s a lot like dicking with the fuel/air mixture in a carburetor. Once you get that adjusted, you still have a damper to adjust. For that reason, I found it to be desirable to buy pellets a pallet at a time. That way they tended to come from the same batch and be reasonably consistent in how they burnt from bag to bag. Cherry pits weren’t as good. Corn, in addition to its other problems, was too inconsistent.
You can probably guess I don’t burn corn at all any more.
Scumpup - Thanks for the info. Based on my climate, approx how many pounds of pellets do you think I’d likely burn in a day? And where do you buy them? A co-worker has two multi-fuel stoves to heat her 4000 sq ft house, and she says that they don’t have trouble burning straight corn, although moisture content varies from place to place. If she gets locally grown corn it’s about 56 lb/bushel, but corn from Nebraska (where she has family) comes in at about 48lbs/bushel. I don’t mind a bit of maintenance, but I don’t like that dead fireplace smell I’d get when I’d let my old fireplace burn out.
I heat with a regular wood heater and have been very happy with that for years.
A friend has a grille that works with wood pellets and he does a lot of slow-roasting with it. If the heater you get works as well as his grille you should be happy with it.
With the climate you describe, you ought to be able to get 24 hours or more out of a bag of pellets if you keep the stove clean and have tuned the fuel/air mix for an efficient burn.
How much does a bag of pellets cost? Just curious. I cut my own wood, and can heat a 2100 sq. ft. house for 24 hours with, on average, 12 sticks of wood in my wood heater. My climate isn’t much different from the OP’s.
If you buy them in the off season in quantity, you can get good quality pellets for under $3 a bag. Price goes up in the winter and buying individual bags from places like Home Depot is seldom a good deal.
Better quality pellets burn hotter and you can turn down the feed rate, stretchin out how long 50 pounds lasts. They also generate less ash.
The trick with these stoves is getting the burn just right. If the mixture is too rich, you don’t get good heat and the stove will soot up. If it’s too lean, you get excessive fly ash formation and the heat exchangers lose efficiency. Once you have it tuned for a particular fuel, though, it requires little more than dumping a bag into the hopper when it gets low and adjusting the damper if you turn up the heat level.
See, there’s actually a couple different controls that effect the auger. There’s a base rate at which it feeds the fuel. This is the one you adjust in concert with the air that is forced into the burn chamber. Once that is set, most of these stoves have numeric settings instead of thermostatic settings. 1 is lowest and 9 is highest on my stove. You’d set it to 9 when it’s really cold out. When you change this setting, you adjust the damper to correct the burn. It’s more complicated to explain than to do. The main reason it took me a while to get on to how to do it with my stove is that all of this is controlled by a digital keypad and neither the manual, nor the DVD, nor the manufacturers website explained what the various functions meant or how to switch back and forth or how to change them. Once I figured things out on my own, it became easy to adjust the burn and get good heat with a minimum of ash and soot.
John Carter of Mars - Can you leave your stove for a full day of work and have is still going when you get back? My main prejudice against plain woodstoves is I don’t want to come home to a cold house, have to work to get a fire going, only to finally get warm as I’m going to bed.
That’s why I ditched my woodstove. If I loaded it up in the morning before I went to work and adjusted things so it burnt low all day, I’d get home to a stove with some coals in it and a house that wasn’t really warm.
I check the pellet stove in the morning to see if it needs pellets, diddle with damper a bit if necessary and go. When I get home the house is warm.
If loaded fully, it will keep the house warm for around 16 hours. This is a Wonder Wood brand (old). I’ve been using it for nearly 20 years with no problems.
As was mentioned above about the pellet burner, it does take a little practice to learn to operate it but it’s been worth it to me. Also, if the electricity goes out, this stove keeps on heating as there is nothing electric about it.
I usually burn about 2.25 cords of wood each winter. One could get by with less. We like a warm house and I own timberland, chainsaws and trucks, so my wood is free and we have no incentive to conserve.
John Carter - I have lots of trees on my property, but most if it is cedar, which I’d imagine wouldn’t be great for burning. And chain saws scare me, plus splitting wood is a lot of work, even though I’m a relatively strong woman. Pellets and corn just load into a hopper, which appeals to me.I’ve rarely lost power, but I’ll admit the ability to keep the home heated if the power went out is a good point. I can do that with propane. I can’t afford $400+ /month it costs, though.
One of the stoves with battery back-up or a small generator to keep the stove and maybe a light or two going eliminates the worries about power outages.
StG, I would check and double check availabilty and price of pellets locally. My son had a pellet stove in Colorado and loved it, but you could get bags of pellets for some ridiculously cheap price at any corner store plus any hardware or feed store there. I haven’t made a search locally, but I’ve never seen the pellets in the 'Boro. Though you could use corn, I understand it takes more bulk to produce a given amount of heat when using corn. That could get tedious.
I keep a kerosene stove for power outages. It must work pretty well in keeping them away, it’s still in the box in which I bought it some 10 years ago.
You may also be eligible for a rebate for upgrading an old stove. From EPA funds administered by state and local authorities, $500 towards a new and improved unit!
I really, really want to replace our fp with a stove insert.
Cub Mistress - I thought if I decided to go the pellet stove route, I’d just buy a ton of pellets. I could store them in the old summer kitchen. But you’re right, I’ve only seen the compressed pine pellets to be used as horse beeding. I think pine would burn too fast, and I know that those are about $5/40lb bag. I wonder if the TSC carries stoves? They usually have wood stoves and gas and propane heaters.
My stove came from a local dealer, not TSC. I got a better price on it because I bought it in late winter and “the season” was coming to a close. The store owner sells pools and their associated goods also and was moving over to his spring/summer line. TSC’s price on pellets is competive with feed stores and the other places that carry them with the exception of Home Depot whose price was crazy high.
