Pellet stove?

I am tired of being cold and getting up every 2 hours to put wood in my fire place. I dont have access to municipal gas where I live and Propane distributors are notoriously unreliable in my area. I have been thinking about a wood burning soap stone stove insert in the fire place for the house and a pellet stove for my basment shop.

I then got to thinking, why not a pellet stove in the house as well? It would be cheaper in the short term and less maintanance. I also wouldnt have to continously stoke it. I do have all the fire wood I could ever burn however. I live in the middle of 5 acres of old growth hard wood and wont have to fell a heathy tree ever. Natural attrition supplies me with seasoned wood but I dont have time or inclination to cut and split it. A 40# bag of wood pellets is about $6.00 in this area.

So does anyone have experiance with either a pellet stove or soapstone stove?

I don't have much experience but I know that they're pretty efficient heaters - much more than a fireplace, which vents most of its heat out the chimney.

http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/pellet-stove/1926/page1/

I love my pellet stove. It's a Quadrafire and it's on the first floor of my house. It has completely replaced oil heat on the first floor, but it has no effect on the second floor. The house is about 2800 square feet.

They work best with a big open floor plan. Don't expect to heat four bedrooms on your second floor with a first floor pellet stove.

When considering a pellet stove, I always tell people to think of them as a wood burning hot air furnace. They don't radiate massive amounts of heat like a wood stove. You can touch an operating pellet stove (but not the glass or chimney pipe!). But they are easier to regulate than a wood stove. When I lived in Maine and heated a large colonial with a wood stove, the house would be 120 degrees at bedtime and 40 at 7am. The pellet stove produces nice steady heat as needed.

Pellet stoves blow hot air and they are noisier than you might expect. Very easy to clean, load and live with, though. My wife will fill the pellet stove. She wouldn't go near a wood stove. Or a wood pile.

When I bought mine about 7 years ago, I was all enthusiastic about burning corn. BUT, at that time, corn as fuel was only practical if you were in the mid-West. Now, corn prices have gone through the roof. Also, most stoves need to be started on pellets and then switched to corn as the pellets light easier. My stove has a thermostat and kicks on and off as needed, so corn is not an easy option for me. And one more thing about corn vs. pellets: Mice eat corn but they tend to ignore bags of pellets.

We use a 15 yr old pellet stove as a primary heat source in our 2k square foot modular house (propane furnace as backup). It sits in the living room and runs about 2 to 2-1/2 days on a single hopper full (1 40 pound bag of pellets, runs only at night) depending on auger settings (low heat or plasma welding hot )

$6.00 a sack is about what we pay as well. There are various brands of pellets out there. Some burn better than others. Some produce a sh!t ton of ash and require you to clean out under the burn grate more often. Others produce less ash but tend to produce clinkers (pellets that refuse to burn and form clumps in the burn grate that you need to break up). Try various brands and go with what works for you. All that's available near me is Terra-miga (lots of ash)and Lingeticts (usually pretty good but needs a lot of air flow so they don't clink up on you).

What ever brand of stove you get, keep it clean! get the outside air intake vent too! And if you can plumb it into your central heat ducts even better.

we pondered buying a pellet stove for 2 seasons, then one day, Martin Luther King day to be exact, while walking past the pellet stoves in Lowe's, we stopped. It turns out they were having a 50% off sale, that day only. Bought one and now regret I didn't buy two for the regular price of one.

You won't save as much as you'd like to think you will save, especially if you've already got firewood around. Pellets aren't free, and aren't even particularly cheap (~$220 a ton this year).

On the plus side, the stoves are reliable and pretty durn efficient.

You shouldn't be getting up every two hours to play with your wood stove though. Not if you bank the fire right for the night. You really should only need to get up once, and that's only if you're trying to keep it burning, as opposed to banking it. A big bed of hardwood coals will keep things hot for many hours with no maintenance.

I thought about one for my basement which has a wood stove right now. What turned me away and the only thing that turned me away is the pellets. Much like firewood, it has to go from the back of your truck to the stove. Labor intensive but OK if you're 25.

That's it, my only bitch. I have city type gas plumbed into the house so I'm going that way. The only thing to consider and I don't know how rural you are Porksboy, but if you lose power it doesn't run, at least the auger that drops the pellets doesn't run. Maybe one offers a hand crank auger but I never got that far in the research.

Dan

We just moved into a house a week ago with one and I have been running it every night. 1800 sq ft rambler, has no problem maintaining and even raising the temperature in the main open areas of the house, and keeps the heat pump from kicking on. I keep a fan running next to it on low to help push the air through the house.

Only drawback for us is the bedrooms don't really get heated up, I think mostly because we close the doors to keep the dogs from wandering in there.

914Driver is right, the augers and the blowers won't run without electricity so if your power goes out, so does the stove, and its ability to blow the smoke out of your house. A friend of mine was telling me he's heard you can get a kit to run it off a battery (like a car battery?) if your power goes out and I need to look into that. Or if you have yourself a backup generator then you should be fine.

You can do a marine battery backup with a power inverter. It's been on my to-do list for 8 years.

As cold and long as winter is here, most who have pellet stoves in my area got rid of them within 3-4 years. (Other than the people who use them only occasionally). They are proving to be just too expensive to run as a primary heat source. Like wood, there is a big difference in pellets, and you don't want the El Cheapo ones. Pellets here went from $160-$180/ton (pallet) four years ago, to $250-$260/ton now. I was going through a 40# bag every day or so, and had to run it Nov.through March. When the price started to climb, I did some ciphering and figured I was using 5-6 tons (50-40# bag= 1 ton or a pallet) over the course of the winter. That was just way too much $$ for winter heating. On the plus side, it was a bit less less labor intensive (compared to wood), cleaner burning, for the most part, and didn't need as much tending to. On the minus side, it took up a lot of room to store the bags inside, the auger would run constantly(using electricity) and was noisy, and the stoves themselves were not cheap. I now buy good wood-cut, split, and delivered for $40-$50 a cord. Yes, I know that is cheap, but that's what wood sells for here. Craigslist and the Swap Sheet always has ads for people selling their pellet stoves. The new pellet stoves I see now have much bigger hoppers and run quieter but also cost $1500-$2500. Maybe this is just local, but it makes no sense in my area to heat with pellets.

EDIT: O.P.- I payed $350 for my soapstone stove (plus the $400 I got for the pellet stove) and am pleased as punch. If you're paying $6/bag=$300 /pallet. Even with bulk buying, that's at least$250-$275. A wood burning fireplace insert shouldn't be too expensive, and a lot more efficient than the fireplace.

My wood burning insert (no soapstone...just easy to source/replace firebrick) will go overnight without needing a reload, even with its relatively small firebox. Often the fire is gone in the morning, but the stove is still putting out plenty of heat and a fresh load of wood will relight itself on the coals. We don't heat exclusively with it (since we've got tenants downstairs) but it's the best investment in the house we've made. I dunno if we save money overall because the temptation is to keep the house HOT, but walking to work on a 5 degree day like today is a lot nicer after waking up to a 75-80 degree house rather than one at 65. The newer inserts are ~75-80% efficient.

Bought it online and did the installation myself. Happy to give pointers to good places to buy stuff without the markup associated with buying from a brick and mortar fireplace dealer.

Also check out hearth.com. Folks there are VERY knowledgeable about wood/pellet heating.

http://www.gas-turbines.com/nt6/index.html

What about one of these? Wood heat , electricity and a turbo!

one of the houses we are looking at has a pellet stove. be curous to talk to the owners about it.. i dont really know alot about em.. but a buddy who has one one swears by it.

foxtrapper wrote: You won't save as much as you'd like to think you will save, especially if you've already got firewood around. Pellets aren't free, and aren't even particularly cheap (~$220 a ton this year). On the plus side, the stoves are reliable and pretty durn efficient. You shouldn't be getting up every two hours to play with your wood stove though. Not if you bank the fire right for the night. You really should only need to get up once, and that's only if you're trying to keep it burning, as opposed to banking it. A big bed of hardwood coals will keep things hot for many hours with no maintenance.

The OP has a fireplace, not a wood stove. I agree with everything you said about a wood stove. When I was a kid, we sealed off the fireplace and installed a wood stove. It cut the oil bill in half; 3-4 logs, proper damping, and it would last all night. With all the bedrooms on the second floor, the heat went where it was needed. OP doesn't want to mess with firewood, however, nor does his wife.