Pellet stove

We put in a pellet stove earlier this year. It's working great. It's heating a 5,000 sf home for $7 a day to 70 degrees. Sorry about the carbon, but the cost reduction and the ability to diversify our energy sources more than outweighs it.

Comments

[Michael Tanji]

Having just come back from two weeks in corn country I can confirm that corn/pellet models are all the rage. Difficult to find models of any size in stock and a wait of months is not unusual. When the in-laws can supply more than enough winter heat with just what falls on the gainery floor why would you _not_ diversify?

[Robert Paterson]

I have also added one this fall and I agree with all that you say John. I heat the house with a wood boiler and with solar for water and have a pellet stove in the Granny Falt and a EPA wood stove in the main house. 3,500 suare feet.

The pellet aces the wood as the whole handling aspect is so much easier. Aquiring, splitting blocking, storing 8 cords of wood is a lot of work. I stacked 6 months of pellets in 30 minutes.

Using waste material is a plus as well - in theory we can make pellets out oif any waste wood.

But I have also found that there are good pellest and poor ones.

In London where the clean air act prohibits the buring of wood and coal, pellet stoves are accepted. My bet is that this will become a huge technology

[Marcello]

"My bet is that this will become a huge technology"

My father has switched from methane to wood for heating too (a conventional design stove, a lot of work as you will probably know). But that because he has cheap access to some wood sources. Otherwise if he had to buy wood on the market it would not be that convenient. Frankly I have doubts about about how huge exactly this trend could be. Wood is already used for others purposes (paper and a variety of others things) and must be grown somewhere. Beyond certain levels of consumption for heating will compete with those others purposes. Increases in wood production might end up competing with others land uses, such as food production.

[Bob Morris]

How do you make the pellets?