Wood and Coal Stove Advisory

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Cost of a pellet stoves averages about $2,000 installed—expensive, but cheaper than a cordwood stove when you factor in cost and upkeep of the ceramic-lined or insulated metal chimney that the log stove needs and the pellet burner doesn't. You might question spending so much for a new wood stove when the fuel doesn't grow on trees, so to speak. But the wood-products industry has a whole lot of sawdust and wood chips to dispose of and will go to considerable effort to sell it rather than pay to dispose of it. They've sold a low volume of compressed-sawdust "Presto-Logs" to recreational fireplace owners for 50 years. But pellets are for serious heating and the potential sales volume warrants serious investment. For one, backyard-barbecue fuel king, Kingsford Charcoal, has just finished a multi-million dollar plant in Pennsylvania that will make pellets as widely available in the Northeast as they are in the Northwest. More plants are building and you may be sure that the wood-products industry will do its best to assure that pellet stoves are here to stay.

Houses were built around thermal-mass firestoves so there would be a heat-radiating wall in each room

Bulk pellets cost from $100 to $150/ton (a one to two month supply), depending on hauling distance, but even bagged fuel at about $3.50 per 40-lb. bag (a one to two day supply) compares favorably with cord-wood and beats fossil fuels sideways.

Clean, efficient and work-free they may be, but pellet-burners aren't wood stoves by any traditional measure. You can't pelletize trees from your own woodlot and can't just toss in a log or two when you want a quick blaze. I asked one retailer if the stoves produced real wood flames. "Sure" he said. "There's a tempered-glass window, and you can put in a gas log and it'll look just like a grate fire." Pellet stoves are fine for town dwellers who must buy fuel, need an automated and self-tending heating system during the work day, and who want to do the planet a favor by heating clean with renewable energy. But I don't know a seasoned country cordwood burner yet who has installed one.

Thermal-Mass Firestoves

The fourth technology encouraged by the new EPA regulations is one more new idea that has been around for ages. The thermal mass (Russian/Finnish) firestove— Kacheloven in Swedish—has been heating Northern European buildings for hundreds of years. Dense, long-burning hardwood is rare in Siberia, the Austrian alps or Scandinavia, but there is a great deal of lightweight aspen, birch and sappy coniferous wood. As fuel, these woods offer only a short, hot blaze. A thermal-mass stove is a thick heat sink of ceramic or soft rock surrounding just such a small, hot fire kept in a small firebox and exhausted by a convoluted "folded" flue. Typically, the firestove is fired up only two or three times a day. By the time the flame-cleansed, creosote-free exhaust fumes find their way through the repeated "S"-turns of the flue, most of the wood's energy has been absorbed by the heat sink—which radiates it into the home for hours.

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