Pyromania Update - Strike!

First the Wood Pile:

I must confess now. Last week I was visiting my glorious wood pile, and I noticed that it was listing to one side. It was leaning a bit toward the house. I nudged it. It wiggled. I nudged it again. It wiggled some more. I decided to tie a rope around it and secure it to our deck. I nudged it again. It wobbled. I gave it a shove from the safer side, away from where it was leaning, and down it came. It sounded like pins in a bowling alley. So I was quite thankful that I was the one to discover the problem and that nobody else was around to be surprised by it.

Today I restacked it. A little better, but still not perfect. A little shorter, which will make my wife happy, but shorter mainly because we actually burned some wood.

Now, moving onto pellet stove news:

We did have a recent adventure here at the house. We returned from being away for Thanksgiving to find that our gas furnace had been off for 3 days. It seems that every so often, it would try to start up, but didn't. As it was early evening, we turned on the pellet stoves, moved bedding to the family room, tried to find the source of the problem, and find a heating guy to fix it. We had a toasty time camping out in the family room, but the house which started at 47 degrees inside when we got home was not very hospitable. The pellet stove eventually got it up to 58 degrees. This was with the stove on maximum. By morning the stove had burned up all it's fuel.

BTW, the furnace needed a new ignition element - the thing that lights the gas. The old one had burned out. The gas company had said they couldn't come check it out for at least a week! (Good thing I'm able bodied.) The local repairman, referred to me by my neighbor, came the next day, fixed it, and said he'd send a bill, which I expect won't be very big.

Fire In the hole

This is a shot of one of our pellet stoves aflame. When the room is cold, it is cozy to sit in front of the stove and enjoy the glow and the radiant heat. The front of the stove, the glass, and the stove pipe are hot, but unlike a wood stove, the rest of it is cool. When the stove is on low, the stove pipe is actually warm - and not hot - because of the high efficiency. Every few seconds, the pellets drop down a chute making a quaint little plinking sound when they land in the little metal box. The only other sounds I hear is the faint roar from the fire, the turn of the auger which delivers the pellets, and blower.

In case you were wondering, this is a Travis pellet stove (Lopi - Heritage Bay). The stove has a switch which can be manual, automatic, or off. Manual means you hit another button to start it, and it will keep running. Automatic means if you hook up an external room thermostat, then it will cycle on and off like any heating device depending upon the room temperature. It also has two knobs one is oddly labeled 'Heat Output' which really means 'heat level' or really 'feed rate of pellets'. If I turn this up to max, then fuel (the pellets) will be fed more frequently into the fire box. The other one reads 'Fan' and this is actually the 'Heat Output' since when the fan is set to high, the stove will output heat (blow hot air) faster.

As promised, I hooked a thermostat to the pellet stove. Just about any thermostat available from your local hardware store will do. I bought some telephone wire and 1/4 inch contacts to hook it up. I even get a rebate from my gas company, because I bought an EnergyStar compliant thermostat which will let me program it. For example, I can set it to heat the room up more in the morning and less at night.

BTW, I'm told that my pellet stove can even burn a mixture of up to 10% corn kernels. I wonder if occasionally some will pop!

Pallets of Pellets

We can't figure out exactly how to heat our house. Our house can be heated with forced-air gas heat, electric (in one big room), wood (fireplace in living room), or pellets. As I noted on a previous entry, when faced with too many choices, we humans may not make any choices at all, and ultimately we may feel bad about those we do make. For heating our house, it's too early to tell.

Our home came with 2 pellet stoves. There is one upstairs and one downstairs. The downstairs one is an insert - it lives within the fireplace; the other is free-standing.





Pellet stoves are like wood stoves in appearance and general function - they burn wood to heat homes, but pellet stoves are more modern. They have a button to turn them on, have knobs and switches to adjust their settings, and an electric fan to blow the heat. They run on wood pellets which are fed by a motor into a little firebox to be burned at a regular rate. Because the fuel of the stove is standardized, pellet stoves run automatically and can burn more efficiently than wood stoves or other means of heating. They also have remarkably low amount of emissions.

But pellets don't grown on trees, you know. They have to be manufactured and ordered. Just as wood for heating has to be felled, cut, split, and aged, wood pellets are made from compressed wood waste from sawmills where they are squished into mostly uniform sized pellet resembling rabbit food. The pellets can be poured like grain into sacks which can be easily transported and dumped into the hopper of a pellet stove.



I could give you the hard math here, but I must admit that avoided that myself. I did not want to calculate BTUs and compare fuel prices. I just wanted a rule of thumb to go by. Basically, to heat a generic home you could use a bag of pellets each day. So I figured that I couldn't go wrong if I ordered 150 bags. If I ran out before winter was over, I could just fall back on our gas heat. Late this summer I ordered 3 tons of wood pellets. 3 pallets of pellets. 150 bags of pellets. 6,000 pounds for $750. It took them a month to deliver them.



Once they were left on the driveway, we moved them bag by bag to our secret lair which is an unheated room in our home accessible from only the outside that we simply cannot figure out.



Pellet stoves require some work, although definitely not as much work as wood stoves. We've only been using them a few weeks here, since we only got our first frost a few days ago, so I can't yet rely upon our heating experience.

Some regular tasks for pellet stove owners:

• turning on and off the stove when needed
  
• carrying in pellet bags regularly
  
• refilling the stove daily
  
• cleaning the stove weekly

If you were wondering why we are going through this. It's because pellet stoves are supposed to be a cheap sustainable way to heat your home. They pollute less, and their fuel is wood waste which is a renewable resource. Also our pellet stoves do deliver that glowy warmth and faint smoky aroma that you come to rely on when you burn something. Quite primeval actually, in a modern sort of way.

On my todo list:

• figuring out how to best heat the house using the combination of pellets and gas heat
• adding a thermostat to one of the pellet stoves, so it can go on and off automatically
• attaching a fresh-air intake, so the stove does not suck any heat out of the room
• getting a long brush to clean the stove pipe annually
  

Some links:

• General information about pellet stoves.
• Comparison of wood pellet prices in western Massachusetts.
• My follow-up post about thermostats.