With the continued increase in home heating costs, I have been researching wood pellet furnaces. I have found conflicting testimony on their ease of use, payback, and heating abilities. Instead of counting on the Net and the manufacturers for my research, I decided that surely one of the Dopers have some experience with these. Let’s see, this is General Questions, so maybe I better make this a question. Does anyDoper, anywhere, have anything they can share with me about wood pellet burning furnaces?
We been using them for about 10 years, you get what you pay for. Our first model was a high end Quadra-Fire and worked like a dream. We moved and left it with the house. We picked up a “cheaper” model, Englander for about $1,500. We went cheap as we’re rebuilding the house and didn’t really want to invest a ton of dough in heating until we were sure what we were going to use. We were going to buy a wood stove, but the quality of the wood varied too much and the missus wasn’t keen on the soot that often comes with it. Also we had three chimneys and they were crap, the pellet stove can vent through a wall, si we didn’t have to worry about the chimneys.
One problem with the Englander is there’s no thermostat, it’s always on and you have a manually light it. That’s not really a big deal, as it’s freaking cold and it’s always on anyway. The lighting consists of pouring a flamable gel on a handful of pellets and lighting it. The higher end models, are self-igniting. The second problem with the “lower” end stoves, is they can jam, the pellets can jam the Auger and stop them from feeding pellets into the hopper. This didn’t happen with the Quadra-fire, but has happened several times with the Englander. It’s just a matter of money, and design, The Englander is just a down and dirty machine, IMO but functional.
While the stove will usually turn itself off when it jams, a couple of times we’ve been woken up in the night by the smell of smoke. The auger jamed ‘open’ and the pellets in the auger ignited and heated the auger. The heat transferred to the upper auger and then all the way up to the containment area, and started to ignite the pellets in there…40 pounds of them. Fortunately it takes quite high temp to ignite the pellets so all we had was smoking pellets…
My only real concern was the 'too many parts to break" factor. There’s quite a bit of things that can go wrong, but they never have. The ONLY real problem you will have is loss of power, no power, no heat. Which is why you should never have a pellet stove has your only source of heat. We do, but we have a battery back up.
The pellets come in 40 lb bags and are sold at Walmart now. In the old days, you had to go to a real supply store to get them. We use two bags a day when it gets really cold (upstate NY) and buy then by the ton $150-$200 and it costs us about $700 for the season. When we lived downstate it was around $400.
Hope that helps.
I just moved into a house with a wood pellet stove, and it is easier to use than a wood stove, but more trouble than a gas furnace. I have an Englander, and it produces loads of heat. It is pretty easy to light, and with a little practice, I can set it to keep a pretty constant temperature in the house. There is the problem of getting the heat into different rooms, which we solved with the strategic placement of fans before we go to bed. You have to clean the ashes every week or so, and it can be kind of messy, even when just lighting it.
The only problem right now is the availability of pellets. Here in New Hampshire, there has been a real run on them lately, and you have to call every morning to see if a truck came in overnight. Last week, Home Depot got in a shipment of 22 pallets (1 ton each), and they were sold out in 2 hours. The price has gone up from $199 per ton last year to $229 this year, and if demand stays this high, I would expect further increases as winter closes in.