Coal or Pellet stove?

I've got a woodstove in my basement, works well and all the ash, bark and BS is in the basement, not on the hardwoods. I burn about 5 cord a year. A guy dumps it in my yard, I move it to a pile, move it 1/2 cord at a time into the basement, clean, sweep, worry about chimney fire etc., I'ved had enough.

I have natural gas into the house and thought about one. My friend has a pellet stove but suggested I look into coal. Same type of stove, auger sping sthe kibbles into the fire, little ash but 4X the btu of Pellets.

Any thoughts?

Dan

i have this one:

http://www.vogelzang.com/browse.cfm/noresman-add-on-furnace/4,12.html

it burns coal or wood. i have not tried coal yet because we have lots of wood to burn, but it works great and we have disconnected the oil furnace. we have two electric sunheat heaters that kick on at night when the fire goes down/out that keep the house warm until morning.

Just curious, where does one buy coal these days?

Dan-

Most of the people in this area that had pellet stoves got rid of them. At $250 a pallet( ton) they aren't real economical to run anymore. They're O.K. to look at or occasional use, but not if you have to run them constantly. The auger gets jammed( or breaks), they're usually noisy, and require electric to run. That means it keeps the meter turning. Here, wood is still only $45-55/cord so it's worth the hassle. Coal stove is definitely the way to go, you can still use wood in it, but I'd stay away from the auger business. A buddy gets coal loaded into his pick up, then shovels it into five gallon buckets. He's heating a 2400 sq.ft. house with one bucket a day. Still a bit labor intensive. Another problem with pellets is you're constantly handling 40# bags, and have to have the room to store fifty of them at a time. The BTUs vary widely, depending on the composition and the glue used. Not all are created equal. The offer to help run heat under the floor and into the crawlspace still stands, but will have to wait until June.

In reply to DeadSkunk:

I guess it's a regional thing, but in NE Pennsylvania you can get a ton of anthracite delivered for under $200.

Yikes, wood here is $120/cord.

I've got a pellet stove here. A ton of pellets was about $325 delivered to the local hardware store. It's been off and on cold here, we usually only burn it at night. Need to remember to turn it off during the day though, we're going through pellets kinda fast. It's much better than the wood stove we had because this one has an internal fan, the wood stove didn't and would make the living room unbearable, and the rest of the house freezing. It'd sure be nice to have a house with central heat & air, but that takes moneyz. LOL

We have a pellet stove, we use it to supplement the furnace when temps drop below freezing. We've got one big room in the house that works well with the stove. Our pellets are usually right around $200/ton, we buy them when we see a good price and bung them in the shed - I think we're sitting on about 2.5 tons right now, which should take me until December 2013. We run it on the lowest setting, which eats about a bag every 30 hours or so. That's all I have to do to it, just dump a bag in every day or so when its running. A wood stove would need a lot more attention.

It usually ends up running for 3-6 weeks non-stop depending on the weather. We clean it out every 2-3 weeks. This is the first year I've had any trouble with it, a motor went out in the lower auger. Turns out the greasable bearing hadn't been, so that's my mistake. Otherwise, it's reasonably quiet and a big hit with Janel.

I've had a Quadrafire pellet stove for about six or seven years now.

We like it, but I always tell people that they should think of them as a wood burning hot air furnace. They don't radiate heat like a wood or coal stove; they blow hot air into the room. Radiated heat just feels better. The pellet stove is also a little noisy.

My wife likes it because she can dump a half a bucket of pellets into it when I'm not here (she wouldn't be feeding a coal or wood stove on her own), plus there are no snakes or spiders hiding in a pile of pellet bags.

We burn about a bag per day in mid-Winter and I clean it about once a week.

914Driver wrote: Yikes, wood here is $120/cord.

I wonder if that price is for a full cord? Around here, a face cord cost 50 or 55, and its one stack, 8 feet long, by 4 feet high. A full cord is 3 face cords. Unfortunately, everybody around me at least refers to a face cord as just a cord.

Joey

joey48442 wrote:

914Driver wrote: Yikes, wood here is $120/cord.

I wonder if that price is for a full cord? Around here, a face cord cost 50 or 55, and its one stack, 8 feet long, by 4 feet high. A full cord is 3 face cords. Unfortunately, everybody around me at least refers to a face cord as just a cord. Joey

Also, in case anybody is wondering, my little 900 square foot house with good insulation and new windows use a face cord of wood in about 15 days here in MI. Not bad, about a hundred bucks a month to heat.

Joey