PELLET STOVES WOOD ENERGY FOR ALL
(Page 6 of 9)
October/November 1995
By John Vivian
But, instead of converting sun energy to human energy via the petroleum/ NH4N03/corn/hog/pork chops route, isn't it more efficient to skip the livestock steps and use the corn directly in any way we can? I think you'll agree that providing our internal heat by eating the corn direct (and using compost rather than ammonium nitrate as fertilizer) is ten times more efficient. In numbers: 20% of 10% = .02% efficiency vs. .002%.
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A pellet stove burning corn at high efficiency heats our outsides (and can cook meals, dry mittens, and keep the teapot hot at the same time) more efficiently than we convert corn to inside energy. And, if the corn is organically grown (and more and more is being raised commercially without chemical fertilizers and with the barest minimum of weed and bug-controls) we can avoid the energy loss at the petroleum link.
Best of all, if you grow your own corn for fuel, the stove will warm you by burning organic corn raised at no cash or environmental cost, we're approaching no-impact heating.
Growing enough corn to heat you through the winter is a little much. I figure that aiming for a low-soil-drain, homestead-level yield of 50 bushels (weighing 55 Ibs apiece) per acre, it would take me at least 20 acres using a three-year rotation system (planting green mulches or leaving the land fallow for two years between corn crops) to keep the soil at full vitality without chemicals. It is easier for me to harvest the wood lot. However, if you live in Kansas and have the land, tractor, and harvesting equipment and grain storage, you might try growing your heating fuel. If you do, tell Mother about it, will you?
However, buying corn—cheapest in you-haul-it bulk from an elevator—you still come out ahead. Two cautions: Be sure the corn is bone dry. And, if buying in bulk, be sure you don't get a lot of millings that can gum up the auger.
The Future of Wood Heat
Like yourself perhaps, and many other Mother Earth News readers for sure, I'm just too rough around the edges to live easily with a pellet stove. They are very expensive, automated machines that need a level floor and stable environment offering a constant (if tiny) supply and a reliable source of electric power. I prefer to provide life essentials such as wood for heat myself rather than squandering my limited time on this earth working for money to buy it from someone else. I prefer to live free of the grid, well away from sidewalks and as close to nature as I can get, in a tipi or on an old wooden boat or in a rustic cabin that I can leave for months at a time and not worry about having valuable things like pellet stoves stolen or vandalized.
But, I'm a throwback. Modern people actually like living in towns or cities, or they are stuck there even if they don't much like it, and fire logs are just too awkward and low-energy to truck to town and haul up three flights of stairs. Pellet stoves offer the only practical way developed to date for conservation-minded people to heat with renewable fuel in town. And the planet could use the help. Gas-log heaters are growing in popularity, but they don't distance us a bit from dependence upon fossil fuels. In that sense, those little nuggets might well represent a last stand for heat-energy independence.
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