Oh good! A thread on which I have some experience. I have owned a pellet stove for about four years now. I hate it.

Yes, it is more efficient than a wood stove, yes it can run for days without even looking at it.

BUT, the pellets ARE getting more scarce. I used to be able to get Dry Creek pellets made here in the USA. This year they are virtually unavailable. The stores are doing their best to import other brands from Canada, but supplies are slim to none. The local Agway generally rations pellets around February allowing customers to only buy 5 bags at a time. AFAIK, they use all kinds of sawdust from lumber milling, not just furniture making. Fortunately, the price has not been affected yet, but I suspect it will be soon.

You need a place to store the pellets if you are going to plan for a whole winter. We use our stove in just one room (300 sf family room) and it works great but last winter we used over two and half tons of pellets. That's 150 bags (40 lbs each). We have a detached garage and the pellets took up a lot a of space and I made that many (150) miserable trips usually in frigid weather haulin' them inside. We would have the same issue with a wood stove, though.

As for cost, at about $5/bag now, we can heat that one room for the winter for $750 (I think we paid much less last winter because we paid for two tons early in the season). The cost of the stove was $1000 four years ago and I am handy enough that I installed it myself. But actual costs today for most people would be closer to $3000 or more to have one installed.

Secondly, the pellet stove is a pain to keep clean. The ash is very fine and needs to be cleaned out regularly (every few days at least). It's a messy job and I'm sick of it. Of course a wood stove can be just as messy and needs to be stoked and fed manually, so either way you have to work to stay warm. The pipe needs to be "chimney-swept" occasionally but does not have the creosote problems (and fire dangers) that a regular wood stove has.

Frank is right. You cannot use PVC pipe for the exhaust. You must buy a kit to "vent" the stove. I bought extra pipe and ran my chimney above the roofline and this significantly lessens the odor when you are outside. This is also recommended to reduce the chance of sparks igniting a fire outside.

The electricity required is the other big issue with pellet stoves. Unless you have backup power, it will go out during a power outage and you don't want that to happen during a cold ice storm! A woodstove wins here.

Hope this helps.
Stay warm folks!

Dawg

Are you serious? Do you have any model names or web links? That would mean 87-97% efficient compared to some good (efficient) wood stoves like the following:

http://www.regency-fire.com/Wood/Stoves/F2400/

Dawg~

THe one thing i noticed with some of the pellet stoves i looked at (and the one my brother owns) is the annoying fan/auger. Maybe its just because the ones i looked @ were cheaper stoves (all around 1000)? A woodstove is also cheaper (local place is running a nice LITTLE woodstove for 299). Piping would probably be a bigger hassle on the woodstove (probably go triple insulated?).

Bags of some MO produced hardwood pellets (they say there low ash?) are 3.89/bag @ Home Depot.

Whenever I read someone planning for post-peak and including the words "Home Depot" or some other central supplier, it makes me nervous.

Thanks for your experience Dawg, you're actually changing my mind on pellet stoves. Especially the storage issue, I can store a few tons of wood anywhere, but have no place to keep a ton of pellets dry.

Also I was under the impression they were low maintenance and not high maintenance as you say.

as for PVC piping I believe its mentioned in the article I'm posting below (plus repeated by a friend of mine who was buying one, but balked at the cost). Perhaps it depends on the model.

also I'd just like to mention that as pellet stoves become popular and the manufacture and distibution becomes bigger, pellets may become cheaper per BTU than wood which is normally dependant on a small time local cutter (although this may change as well). However being able to burn "anything" in a wood stove I've always felt was a big advantage for them

for efficiency I've typically seen high efficiency wood stoves rated at 60%-75% and pellet stoves around 80% to 85%. Here's a link (also has a nice price comparison table as well)

Some more notes:

FoxV: The article you posted that mentions PVC pipe as venting material was not written by a manufacturer. I would take that advice with extreme caution. Follow the manufacturer's installation instructions.

The elevated chimney as stated does also have the added benefit of producing a natural updraft that helps prevent smoke build-up inside the house if the electricity goes out in the middle of the night. This is true and is one of the other reasons I did that but forgot to mention it. It does add to the installation cost but if you are going to do it, do it right.

Not all pellet stoves can burn corn. You need to read the specs.

Oh, and another thing I hate about them is the noise. They do make quite a bit of noise with the blowers running full blast and the pellets constantly "tinkling" into the burn pot. You get used to the noise after a while but sometimes when listening to music, well it's hard to describe...it's just an annoyance to me personally.

As for the cleaning issue, I have recommended to others that they buy a small shop-vac to use just for the purpose of cleaning the stove. Also, the bigger the ash pan the stove has the less often it needs to be dumped (obviously). I've seen some pellet stoves that look real nice but have tiny ash pans, so keep that in mind.

Dawg

No problems there I wouldn't install a such an item myself anyways. It may be simple, but the cost savings is not worth the risks in my opinion.

ultimately my house already has a chimney so I would just use it anyways

but not anytime soon. We just renovating the basement and I'll be hell and damned before I tear it up so soon after finishing it (have to yank the fireplace)

http://stovehospital.com/
This is a great site.
(the images are all scaled down and you have to use "view image" -- right click on firefox--to see the full size images)

I looked into getting one of these a few years ago but couldn't convince myself that the cost was worth it. If I were raising a hundred acre's of corn and using it to heat the barn that would be different, but for a house it just doesn't add up IMO.

One of the selling points stressed by the saleperson here in Michigan was the use of cherry pits for pellet fuel, Michigan has a lot of cherry orchards and the commercial growers and canners make a tidy profit on what used to be waste pits. Naturally pits are cheaper, but they also burn quicker. Anyone have any experience with burning pits vs pellets vs corn in terms of thermal efficiency?

I live in northern Michigan and I've been burning wood for years; out of neccessity since I live in a drafty old farmhouse. It is getting harder to cut wood nowdays for a number of reasons. The DNR is getting stricter every year and now has decread that one cannot cut any standing dead trees. Alot more people are out in the woods now trying to get wood for heating. The loggers are cutting enormous swaths of state and federal forest lands, (clear cutting) it looks like enormous bombs were detonated denuding the landscape. I don't know where all of it is going but alot is being chipped up and sent to the 'cogen' plants to burn for electricity. More is sent to the mill and turned into OSB for building. A logger came by last winter and offered to cut my pines off for $1 a ton. I declined.

Getting old and tired I broke down and bought an out door wood-fired boiler and now use this for heating. I don't know how environmentally friendly this is but it beats the hell out of lugging wood in the house and the constant mess. No cold mornings either.

Just what we all suspected:

Prices rise for scarce wood pellets



Everyone, this is a new problem! Pellets have been cheap and AVAILABLE up until this year. (kinda like oil, eh?) Two weeks ago was the FIRST time in four years that I have walked into Agway and they have said they have been completely sold out of all brands of pellets. This is not exactly what you want to hear when your family is cold. As I and others have suggested here, if you are considering buying a pellet stove, think long and hard about whether this is a viable long term strategy.

Fortunately for us, we moved into a new house and left that POS pellet stove behind.

Later,
Dawg

Interesting article. Can't say it's a surprise, though. The U.S. population is too high for everyone to heat using wood (or corn).

(BTW, if anyone reading that article is puzzled about the reference to an "Amsterdam supplier," that's Amsterdam, NY. Not the one in Europe. Big Dutch influence in NY, including the place names.)

FoxV, it sounds convenient, but convenience is costly and that same mindset is what got people hooked on fossil fuels. Thats why people stopped using wood for home heating, they were too lazy to bother and just got gas piped to the home. Now you get pellets trucked to you. With these pellets, supply is going down and it's becoming costly and your just subsidising people who are using gas to heat their homes. With a wood stove, you can burn anything in it for heat and not pay money, or if you don't have wood, you can buy it cheaper than pellets I would imagine. I think the cheapest & simplest option would be the best. Wood is simple to burn if you have some around and renewable, rely only on yourself, more work is involved in lighting and chopping. Gas is pretty simple, most people already have it installed, pipeline gas is transport efficient, but you have to rely on someone to pipe it too you. Pellets need to be manufactured, transported (in some cases Canadia?), need to rely on someone to deliver it too you.

At this moment in time, Gas would be the easiest option and in comparable cost to pellets and require little maintainance. Pellets really are the same as gas, perhaps cheaper, but require more maintainance, and a large upfront cost. Wood stoves can be brought cheap, and require more work to be involved, but if you believe in post peakoil, a wood stove would be a better investment than a pellet stove. I wrote a thread about wood stoves, and there is a guy on ebay selling brick type castiron ones for $75. Also have a thread on using waste motor oil for heating, apparently you can get it for free, it's currently a waste disposal problem and businesses would be glad for you to take it away for them.

I went up to the big woods that start a bit north from here last winter with a friend who is a forester. I noticed huge piles of wood lining both sides of the road for a couple of miles. They were being chipped up for biomass. The year before it wasn't cost effective to even drag the topwood out. Now the problem is that there aren't enough people with tub grinders and trucks to haul it out. The big problem is going to be the fact that you usually leave the tops in the woods, thay rot and return some organic matter to the soil. If they keep biomassing everything without returning something to the woods the good wood won't grow after a while.

the local paper mill has applied for a permit to burn construction waste to make power. I can't believe that they can't get enough biomass there. It must be worth so much now that they don't want to burn it just to make power. Peak biomass came pretty quickly. We have to lock up our own woodyard so that people don't steal our firewood, and it's only early December.

Wood stoves are the best option, but it looks like corn stoves are going to be a better choice than pellets going forward. The country is nowhere close to taxing the corn supply due to people buying corn stoves. Corn's cheap and getting cheaper.