PELLET STOVES WOOD ENERGY FOR ALL
(Page 4 of 9)
October/November 1995
By John Vivian
A bottom door swings out, bringing the ash drawer with it and you scoop out the ash. But, so well burned is the ash, you needn't take it out to the compost or garden or sprinkle it on winter ice more than once a month or so.
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Some older models designed around consistent, low-ash fuel from a single source had a hard time achieving clean burns using fuels with variable ash content. But any stove built after '93 should be able to burn any pellet fuel, with the only difference being small variations in burn times and in ash production.
Cost
Pellet stoves are at once the most expensive and cheapest alternatives in wood-burning space-heaters: expensive because they cost around $3,000 new and $1,700 used; cheap because they don't require a fire-safe lined ceramic chimney or insulated metal flue costing $1,500 to five times that. Pellet stoves burn so efficiently that the end product of combustion, the "smoke," is a small amount of nearly invisible, nearly pure C02 water vapor, by far the cleanest in the industry. It exhausts through a three-inch-wide pipe, smaller than needed for many gas water heaters! Plus, it is so cool that you can can hold your hand in it without discomfort as it exits the stove, and you can exhaust it through a run of heavy plastic plumbing pipe. That's right, a plastic flue.
You'll have to run the micro-flue to the outside, but not all the way straight up through every floor of the house to the roof, just through the nearest outside wall and enough higher than the stove to keep the warm fumes rising.
These stoves are not delicate, but are precision heating devices and they must be installed, or at least the adjustments and hookups to public utilities made, by qualified technicians with appropriate licenses who can obtain required permits and inspections. Don't think you can install it yourself as you might with a conventional wood burner. The burner unit should be installed and vented by a qualified heating tech. The electrical components must be hard-wired by a licensed electrician. Then, the work must pass multiple building inspector's check-offs that an amateur can't arrange or satisfy.
Pellets are a manufactured fuel. You have to purchase them unless you want to spend a million dollars to build your own processing plant. And you couldn't burn sticks in the stove if you tried. (Besides, it's illegal.)
Cost ranges from $75 to $150 (fall 1995 prices) a ton depending on transportation costs—the nearer a plant, the cheaper the pellets. A rule of thumb: Maximum consumption rate is two pounds an hour, about a dime an hour. That's half the cost of oil heat and comparable to the cost of cord-wood (but without the work.) See the chart in the Image Gallery for more numbers.
Corn Heat?
Yep, these stoves will burn corn. Not Golden Bantam or Super XXX Sweet corn on the cob, but the hulled and shucked, air-dried golden kernels of field corn, or "horse corn" raised by the megaton in the Great Plains for livestock feed.
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