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Thinking of buying a pellet stove
|
|
|
| I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
you...but here goes...
We (me, wife, 2 young boys) are thinking of buying our first house, we
live is Massachusetts. The house is a big (2300 sq ft) old (1890)
house. It's got two floors with the (3) bedrooms all on the 2nd floor.
I know that the attic is insulated but I'm not sure about the walls of
the house, I'm assuming they are but I'm going to check on that before
I make an offer.
The house has forced hot air, with oil. I got some info from the local
oil company and it seems the guy who used to live there was buying
about 860 gallons of oil a year. That's pretty expensive, so I was
thinking of buying a pellet stove for supplemental heat. I've been
told that if I buy a good stove and put it on the first floor it will
heat the entire first floor. Has anybody done this? It would seem that
the room the furnace is in would be reeeallly hot, and the other rooms
would get progressively colder as you move away? How do you normally
deal with that?
Can you hook a pellet stove into existing ductwork to more evenly
distribute the heat? Has anybody done that?
Does using a pellet stove substantially increase the electric bill?
I was thinking of putting a stove on the 1st floor and just using the
existing forced hot air system to heat the bedrooms upstairs (which
will require me to move the thermostat upstairs...but that's not a
problem). How do people on this forum generally use and setup their
pellet stoves?
Thanks
| |
| Vaughn Simon 2008-03-09, 1:25 pm |
|
"Mash" <mashman74@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:5d9d036f-11a4-4c53-a368-93eea8520276@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
> I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
> the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
> you...but here goes...
You never got around to the most important question: How many BTU's of fuel
oil can you buy for your buck compared to a buck's worth of pellets? Are there
any other fuels avail to you to compare? A BTU is a BTU, there is nothing magic
about pellets. (A gallon of heating oil is about 150,000 BTU, a 4000# cord of
wood is about 20,000,000 BTU. I don't have numbers for pellets)
That said, there may be value in having a backup heating system. Backup
heating can keep you from freezing when things go wrong, and might allow you to
take advantage in market conditions when one fuel is cheap compared to another.
Vaughn
| |
| Morris Dovey 2008-03-09, 1:25 pm |
| Mash wrote:
>
> I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
> the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
> you...but here goes...
>
> We (me, wife, 2 young boys) are thinking of buying our first house, we
> live is Massachusetts. The house is a big (2300 sq ft) old (1890)
> house. It's got two floors with the (3) bedrooms all on the 2nd floor.
> I know that the attic is insulated but I'm not sure about the walls of
> the house, I'm assuming they are but I'm going to check on that before
> I make an offer.
Insulation is the key to cost and comfort. I can't emphasize that
enough.
> The house has forced hot air, with oil. I got some info from the local
> oil company and it seems the guy who used to live there was buying
> about 860 gallons of oil a year. That's pretty expensive, so I was
> thinking of buying a pellet stove for supplemental heat. I've been
> told that if I buy a good stove and put it on the first floor it will
> heat the entire first floor. Has anybody done this? It would seem that
> the room the furnace is in would be reeeallly hot, and the other rooms
> would get progressively colder as you move away? How do you normally
> deal with that?
In my old (uninsulated) farmhouse in Minnesota, we just gathered
closer around the stove as the weather got colder. Roast on one
side, freeze on the other.
> Can you hook a pellet stove into existing ductwork to more evenly
> distribute the heat? Has anybody done that?
I've talked with local pellet stove dealers who've told me that
some pellet burners can be tied into furnace systems to use
existing blowers, ductwork, etc. There are pellet burners
designed to be located outside the house. The real question
involves current and future cost of pellets - as pellet burners
gain in popularity in an area, availability of fuel may be come
problematic and costs may rise beyond the point of providing any
significant savings.
> Does using a pellet stove substantially increase the electric bill?
It shouldn't. The forced airflow for the burner doesn't require
all that much power.
Have you considered solar heat?
--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/SC_Madison/
| |
| Loren Amelang 2008-03-09, 5:25 pm |
| On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:43:46 -0700 (PDT), Mash <mashman74@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> the guy who used to live there was buying
>about 860 gallons of oil a year. That's pretty expensive, so I was
>thinking of buying a pellet stove for supplemental heat.
That's a _lot_ of pellets. Do you have a truck, lots of handy dry
storage, willingness to carry and dump literal tons of pellets to the
stove, and willingness to clean out the residue from all those
pellets?
>I've been
>told that if I buy a good stove and put it on the first floor it will
>heat the entire first floor. Has anybody done this? It would seem that
>the room the furnace is in would be reeeallly hot, and the other rooms
>would get progressively colder as you move away? How do you normally
>deal with that?
We have a wall switch that runs the furnace blower. Works really great
because our scorched-air furnace air intake is in the ceiling over the
pellet stove. If it was in the floor it would take longer to get the
heat around the house.
>Does using a pellet stove substantially increase the electric bill?
The vacuuming of ashes and mess probably uses as much electricity as
the stove's fan motors. We keep the stove's room air fan low because
it is noisy and isn't needed with the furnace circulator running.
But as one of the other replies says, work out the cost of your fuel
options per output BTU, and don't forget the relative efficiencies of
the stoves/furnaces. By the time I factor in combustion efficiency,
we're better off with electric heat this year, at the local per-bag
prices of good-quality pellets. People who got on the allocation list
for a pallet of pellets early enough are just barely saving money on
those. People who can burn the cheap pellets without their stove
clogging or needing excessive cleanout are doing a bit better...
Loren
| |
|
| Mash <mashman74@hotmail.com> wrote in news:5d9d036f-11a4-4c53-a368-
93eea8520276@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com:
> I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
> the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
> you...but here goes...
The problem I have with pellet stoves is cutting those damn pellets. I
mean if you think choping regular firewood is hard work try carving those
little chunks out of douglas fir or madrone!!
| |
| Steve Ackman 2008-03-10, 3:25 am |
| In <5d9d036f-11a4-4c53-a368-93eea8520276@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
on Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:43:46 -0700 (PDT), Mash, mashman74@hotmail.com wrote:
> I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
> the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
> you...but here goes...
>
> We (me, wife, 2 young boys) are thinking of buying our first house, we
> live is Massachusetts. The house is a big (2300 sq ft) old (1890)
> house. It's got two floors with the (3) bedrooms all on the 2nd floor.
> I know that the attic is insulated but I'm not sure about the walls of
> the house, I'm assuming they are but I'm going to check on that before
> I make an offer.
Our house is ~1900 sq ft built in 1900 uninsulated
walls, but well-insulated attic.
> The house has forced hot air, with oil.
Ours also has a forced hot air furnace burning oil.
>I got some info from the local
> oil company and it seems the guy who used to live there was buying
> about 860 gallons of oil a year.
Last year we burned 840 gallons of oil plus a cord of
wood. (Call it an even 1000 gallons of oil equivalent)
> That's pretty expensive,
Yup. Oil here and now is $3.66/gallon.
> so I was
> thinking of buying a pellet stove for supplemental heat. I've been
> told that if I buy a good stove and put it on the first floor it will
> heat the entire first floor. Has anybody done this?
Ours is in the basement with a single insulated duct
to the living room. I don't know the cfm rating of the
blower, but at a burn rate of 80lbs./day, and the blower
on max, the air temp at that duct runs 160F - 170F.
> It would seem that
> the room the furnace is in would be reeeallly hot, and the other rooms
> would get progressively colder as you move away? How do you normally
> deal with that?
We leave the thermostat at 61. Depending on outside
temp and basement temp, the living room ranges from
64 to 68. The family room, where the thermostat is,
stays right around the setpoint, and the kitchen stays
about 59. Nights when the temperature goes into the
single digits or lower, we light a small fire in the
kitchen wood stove and with both stoves going, the oil
furnace never comes on. With just the pellet stove
heating the living room, the furnace comes on once or
twice a night when the outdoor temp is around 20F.
> Can you hook a pellet stove into existing ductwork to more evenly
> distribute the heat? Has anybody done that?
Our stove manufacturer recommends against hooking
the stove into ductwork used by the furnace. Our living
room has 3 floor registers, so I unhooked one from the
furnace distribution and made it a dedicated pellet
stove register.
> Does using a pellet stove substantially increase the electric bill?
You've got a combustion blower, an agitation motor
and a heat blower. When all three are running at the
same time, ours draws something over 100 watts, but
averages maybe 65. It's been a while since I had the
KAW hooked to it.
> I was thinking of putting a stove on the 1st floor and just using the
> existing forced hot air system to heat the bedrooms upstairs (which
> will require me to move the thermostat upstairs...but that's not a
> problem).
Our house has no upstairs heat from the furnace; just
convection up the stairs. There's a single electric
baseboard heater in the center upstairs room but the
only time I ever used it was the night last year that
went -30F. Anyway, that was the temperature when I
went to bed. Dunno if it actually went lower than
that.
To address some points made by others:
1) cost.
If we burned 1000 gallons of oil, the cost this year
would have been well over $3000. Instead, we got 250
gallons of oil last summer @ $2.63/gal and 7 tons of
pellets @ $235/ton. Total of $2302, plus $65 delivery.
The pellet people like to claim a ton is approximately
equal to 160 gallons of oil. That may be accurate, but
I think it might be a bit "optimistic," and since more
of our heat is going to the basement this year than last,
it's hard to make a direct comparison. At any rate, I'd
be a little more conservative, and estimate a ton of
pellets to be equal to ~140 gallons of oil. Even at that,
at today's prices, a $235 ton of pellets replaces $512
worth of oil. Our stove will have paid for itself in
two years.
We have a multi-fuel stove, built to burn cherry pits,
olive pits, corn, etc. in addition to wood pellets, so
if wood pellets get too high, there may be other more
economical options. At one time, corn was cheaper than
wood pellets. Of course, in today's ethanol crazed
world, that's not the case. Cherry pits mostly come
from the northern midwest, and are less expensive than
wood pellets per ton, but at current prices, shipping
cherry pits isn't cost effective. If wood pellets go
up much at all, cherry pits could well be a solution.
On really cold nights, I dump a few cups of used
motor oil in the hopper (~50 lbs of pellets) to be
soaked up by the pellets, and tweak the combustion air
up a bit. We only dirty a few gallons of motor oil a
year, but I can't think of a better way to get rid of
it than by heating the house with it.
2) Mass/space.
Yup. That's FOURTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS of pellets. It
sounds like a lot, and it is. I had 3 pallets put under
a carport, 3 pallets next to the porch, and 1 pallet
at the bulkhead, where I right off moved it to the
basement. At 3.5'x4' per pallet, that's 100 sq ft of
floor/ground space. The 6,000 lbs in the carport had
to be lugged about 100' 80 lbs at a time (a bag on each
shoulder). Even with the plastic covers, some water
gets inside the pallets exposed to the weather, and
even makes its way inside some of the individual pellet
bags. Outdoor storage means you lose a small percentage
of your pellets to "water damage." Also there's a bit
of hazard involved with the way the water freezes
where the bags meet in "knife edge" shapes. I've
drawn blood on more than one occasion from these
ice knives.
3) cleanup/maintenance.
Once a week, I have to clean out the holes in the
fire pot. Failure to do so chokes off the combustion
air, allowing the pellet feed rate to exceed the burn
rate, meaning I end up with a firepot overflowing with
smoky pellets. It happened ONCE when I thought to push
the limits of the cleaning interval. 14000 lbs. of
pellets means 140 lbs. of ash. The ash isn't super
dense, and it's more granular than regular wood ash, so
it works out to about a 5 gallon bucket (~20 lbs.) for
every ton of pellets.
I've stuck a thermocouple in my vent pipe so I can
tweak the fuel-air ratio to get the highest possible
stack temp. As the stove goes from "just cleaned" to
"needs cleaning" the burn characteristics change quite
radically if you don't keep tweaking it. By keeping
the flue temperature as high as possible for a given
pellet feed rate, the heat imparted through the heat
exchanger should also be pretty well maximized.
All in all, it's a lot more trouble than just calling
the oil truck... but for $700 a year savings, plus
getting off fossil fuels... it's certainly worth it
from my perspective.
For those who might point out that cord wood also
shares many of those advantages, I might add that
pellets have the advantage of only needing to tend the
stove once or twice a day, and cleaning only once a
week. Wood stoves (ours anyway) needs to be fed every
30 minutes if we keep a low fire going, or every 60-75
minutes for a roaring fire, and needs a cleaning every
day or two.
Pellets also burn SUPER clean. Maybe even cleaner
than oil. I can see faint whisps of smoke coming off
the oil chimney, but absolutely nothing at all from the
pellet vent. It could just as easily be a dryer vent
for all you can tell by the exhaust.
</ramble>
| |
| Steve Ackman 2008-03-10, 3:25 am |
| In <aWUAj.293112$MJ6.118225@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>, on
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:14:46 GMT, Vaughn Simon,
vaughnsimonHATESSPAM@att.FAKE.net wrote:
>
> You never got around to the most important question: How many BTU's of fuel
> oil can you buy for your buck compared to a buck's worth of pellets? Are there
> any other fuels avail to you to compare? A BTU is a BTU, there is nothing magic
> about pellets. (A gallon of heating oil is about 150,000 BTU, a 4000# cord of
> wood is about 20,000,000 BTU. I don't have numbers for pellets)
Pellets' heat content varies depending on composition,
but generally run in the neighborhood of 16,000,000 to
17,500,000 per ton. At current local prices, pellet
cost per BTU is comparable to cordwood; considerably
less than oil.
($205 for pellets vs. $250 for cut & split seasoned
hardwood)
| |
| Neon John 2008-03-10, 9:25 am |
| On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 23:58:09 -0400, Steve Ackman <steve@SNIP-THIS.twoloonscoffee.com>
wrote:
> Our house is ~1900 sq ft built in 1900 uninsulated
>walls, but well-insulated attic.
>
>
> Ours also has a forced hot air furnace burning oil.
> Last year we burned 840 gallons of oil plus a cord of
>wood. (Call it an even 1000 gallons of oil equivalent)
>
>
> Yup. Oil here and now is $3.66/gallon.
Daaaaaammmnnn, what part of the country do you live in, Steve? That kind of money
for heating makes me suck wind! I owned a 3 unit apartment building when I lived in
PA that came equipped with a central oil boiler that came over on the Mayflower. It
burned less than that heating all three units. I was so aghast at the cost even back
in the 80s that I yanked out the antique and installed individual gas fired boilers.
>
> We leave the thermostat at 61. Depending on outside
>temp and basement temp, the living room ranges from
>64 to 68. The family room, where the thermostat is,
>stays right around the setpoint, and the kitchen stays
>about 59. Nights when the temperature goes into the
>single digits or lower, we light a small fire in the
>kitchen wood stove and with both stoves going, the oil
>furnace never comes on. With just the pellet stove
>heating the living room, the furnace comes on once or
>twice a night when the outdoor temp is around 20F.
Man, that sounds like a hard way to live. Have you considered getting your walls
injected with insulation? One of my best friends lives in a house about that old and
he's currently getting quotes from insulators for injected insulation. It is
surprisingly economical. At your rate of fuel consumption, I bet it would pay for
itself in a year or two.
> We have a multi-fuel stove, built to burn cherry pits,
>olive pits, corn, etc. in addition to wood pellets, so
>if wood pellets get too high, there may be other more
>economical options. At one time, corn was cheaper than
>wood pellets. Of course, in today's ethanol crazed
>world, that's not the case. Cherry pits mostly come
>from the northern midwest, and are less expensive than
>wood pellets per ton, but at current prices, shipping
>cherry pits isn't cost effective. If wood pellets go
>up much at all, cherry pits could well be a solution.
Have you tried any of the alternative fuels? I wonder how well it works.
I've experimented with a few alternative fuels this winter in my Buck Stove fireplace
insert. Peanut and pecan hulls, both fairly plentiful in this area, worked quite
well. Peanut hulls seem to work a bit better. This is a case of just shovel 'em on
and let 'em burn. I wonder if your feeder would feed the shells if they were
processed through a mulcher first?
>
> On really cold nights, I dump a few cups of used
>motor oil in the hopper (~50 lbs of pellets) to be
>soaked up by the pellets, and tweak the combustion air
>up a bit. We only dirty a few gallons of motor oil a
>year, but I can't think of a better way to get rid of
>it than by heating the house with it.
I'd wondered how that would work with pellet stoves. I'm doing something similar
here. I drilled a small hole, just large enough to pass a 1/4" steel line through
the wall of my insert. A small tank hangs under the mantle. A needle valve controls
the flow. I fill the tank with used oil, build a wood fire and then adjust the valve
to slowly drip oil on it.
When I'm up and about and actively heating the house, this works great. I haven't
made any measurements but my back and arms can detect the reduction in wood that I've
carried into the house. I've come upon a practically unlimited supply of used oil (a
friend with a dirt moving business and lots of heavy equipment) so I'm going to work
out something more automatic next year. Probably some form of gravity-fed pot
burner.
>
>2) Mass/space.
> Yup. That's FOURTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS of pellets. It
>sounds like a lot, and it is. I had 3 pallets put under
>a carport, 3 pallets next to the porch, and 1 pallet
>at the bulkhead, where I right off moved it to the
>basement.
Jesus! My back hurts even thinking about carrying that much fuel. How do you
physically burn that much? Your stove must run on high fire continuously. How does
the heat content on a weight basis compare between pellets and cord wood? I'm trying
to visualize that much cord wood.
> For those who might point out that cord wood also
>shares many of those advantages, I might add that
>pellets have the advantage of only needing to tend the
>stove once or twice a day, and cleaning only once a
>week. Wood stoves (ours anyway) needs to be fed every
>30 minutes if we keep a low fire going, or every 60-75
>minutes for a roaring fire, and needs a cleaning every
>day or two.
What kind of stove was that? I've never had one that required that much attention.
My old Ashley required maybe 3 fuelings a day. My homemade wood furnace held a day's
worth. My current Buck insert needs 3-4 fuelings, depending on the outside
temperature. Its firebox is quite small.
Ashes get cleaned maybe twice a week. I sift my ashes to recover the charcoal. The
recovered charcoal lights with a match and is an instant fire starter. Plus I
recover the fuel value. My sifter is a coal shovel with the floor cut out and
hardware cloth attached in its place. I make one pass through the ashes with that
shovel to recover the charcoal and then shovel again with a regular shovel to get out
the ashes.
> Pellets also burn SUPER clean. Maybe even cleaner
>than oil. I can see faint whisps of smoke coming off
>the oil chimney, but absolutely nothing at all from the
>pellet vent. It could just as easily be a dryer vent
>for all you can tell by the exhaust.
Have you had that oil burner tuned up lately? It might pay you to do so, as a
properly tuned burner won't smoke at all except a little at ignition.
Back to the OP's question. Before settling on a fuel, I suggest two things. One,
investigate having your walls insulated with one of the spray-in technologies.
Regardless of the amount of fuel you burn, you won't be truly comfortable until you
do that. Cold floors, drafts and all that.
Second, evaluate your local market to see which fuel is cheapest. Around here it is
cord wood, the going rate for mixed hardwood being around $80/cord. I've learned
from this group that folks elsewhere pay a LOT more so it wouldn't hurt to check
around.
In your survey, I suggest not overlooking waste oil. Generally, the only cost is
that of retrieving and storing it. There are waste oil heaters available but you can
build one if you're handy with tools.
A multi-fuel furnace or boiler might be a viable option. A friend recently installed
a dual fueled outdoor gas/wood furnace to heat his large playhouse barn. The
automated controls seamlessly transfer to and from gas, depending on whether there is
wood in the firebox.
On a smaller scale, two years ago I helped a friend install a Hardy Stove company
outside stand-alone wood boiler. He heats an approx 1500 sq ft uninsulated house and
a new approx 8000 sq ft metal shop building. In both cases, using water heated unit
heaters. The boiler supplies 180 deg water. He's used much less wood these last two
years than he did previously heating just the house with a fireplace insert.
The Hardy stove is pretty slick. All stainless steel and fully automatic. The
control system maintains the water at 180 degrees by toggling a damper and forced
draft fan. The fire is either burning wide open or is practically completely
smothered. Unlike some other stoves that burn air-starved all the time and emit tons
of noxious smoke, this one is either burning clear or is practically out. Just a
little snake of white smoke emits when the fire is smothered.
He builds a fire at the first of winter and it burns all winter. He fuels it once a
day. In warm weather, the thing will hold a tiny little fire at the bottom of the
wood stack for days.
Cost for everything including air handlers, aluminum PEX and all was about $7k. We
did the installation. He views it as a lifetime investment and after watching it
work, I tend to agree.
John
--
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
http://www.johndearmond.com <-- best little blog on the net!
Tellico Plains, Occupied TN
whole lot. -Marcus Ranum
| |
| Paul M. Eldridge 2008-03-10, 9:25 am |
| On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:43:46 -0700 (PDT), Mash <mashman74@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>I've never owned a pellet stove and haven't known anybody that has so
>the answers to these questions will probably be obvious to alot of
>you...but here goes...
>
>We (me, wife, 2 young boys) are thinking of buying our first house, we
>live is Massachusetts. The house is a big (2300 sq ft) old (1890)
>house. It's got two floors with the (3) bedrooms all on the 2nd floor.
>I know that the attic is insulated but I'm not sure about the walls of
>the house, I'm assuming they are but I'm going to check on that before
>I make an offer.
>
>The house has forced hot air, with oil. I got some info from the local
>oil company and it seems the guy who used to live there was buying
>about 860 gallons of oil a year. That's pretty expensive, so I was
>thinking of buying a pellet stove for supplemental heat. I've been
>told that if I buy a good stove and put it on the first floor it will
>heat the entire first floor. Has anybody done this? It would seem that
>the room the furnace is in would be reeeallly hot, and the other rooms
>would get progressively colder as you move away? How do you normally
>deal with that?
>
>Can you hook a pellet stove into existing ductwork to more evenly
>distribute the heat? Has anybody done that?
>
>Does using a pellet stove substantially increase the electric bill?
>
>I was thinking of putting a stove on the 1st floor and just using the
>existing forced hot air system to heat the bedrooms upstairs (which
>will require me to move the thermostat upstairs...but that's not a
>problem). How do people on this forum generally use and setup their
>pellet stoves?
>Thanks
Hi Mash,
I'm not a huge fan of pellet stoves for several reasons -- while they
do offer some advantages over wood log, pellet stoves require
electricity to operate, they're mechanically complicated and
potentially trouble-prone, and they're fairly fussy in terms of the
quality of their fuel (e.g., moisture content must be kept low and
pellet size must be uniform). Because these machines have two or
three motors, an electronic control board, an igniter, photo eye and
various mechanical components that are susceptible to ash and dust
build-up through the course of normal use, they do require a thorough
cleaning/tune-up at least once a year. Budget between $150.00 to
$200.00 a year for a professional service call if you don't feel
comfortable doing this work yourself -- that's an expense that could
easily wipe-out 15 to 25 per cent of the expected savings right off
the bat. In addition, most stoves must be shutdown once a day/every
other day so that ash and clinker build-up within the combustion
chamber can be removed. Likewise, you'll need to clean the venting
about every fifty bags and, trust me, this is not something you can
ignore. Due to their constant neediness and often temperamental
behaviour, I refer to these products as the "Plymouth Volare of
heating technologies".
In any event, depending upon the sap content of the pellet, you net
about 275,000 BTUs of heat from a 40-lb bag (i.e., 8,600 BTUs/lb x 40
lbs. x 0.80 combustion efficiency = 275,200 BTUs). One gallon of
heating oil provides you with 139,000 BTUs (gross) and typically
between 97,000 and 118,000 BTUs net, as determined by the efficiency
of your furnace. In most cases, one bag of pellets will displace
about 2.5 gallons of heating oil. If this home consumes 860 gallons
of fuel oil, that's the equivalent of 344 bags or just about 7 tons.
Locally, we pay about $4.80 per bag for a premium quality pellet/$240
per ton, so 7 tons would cost you about $1,680.00. At $3.30 per
gallon, 860 gallons of oil will set you back $2,838.00, so the
difference is $1,158.00. It's unlikely you could displace all of your
heating oil demand (some parts of the house will always need a little
extra heat), so your actual savings might come in closer to $800.00 a
year, and if you do have your stove professionally cleaned and
serviced at the end of the heating season, $600.00.
Also, does this 860 gallons cover-off domestic hot water use? If this
home has an oil-fired water heater -- and that's fairly common of
older homes with oil furnaces -- your space heating consumption might
fall in the range of 700 gallons/year with the balance being DHW
related, in which case your net savings could be 20 per cent lower
than what's estimated here.
Lastly, a good quality name brand pellet stove, hearth pad, vent pipe
and installation by a certified technician is probably going to run in
the range of $3,500.00, so your simple pay back is likely to be
anywhere from four to seven years, assuming the spread between both
fuels stays roughly the same. It's not uncommon for a control board,
auger motor or combustion fan to fail over that time span and one or
more service calls could seriously eat into your savings. This is one
of those products where an extended warranty plan makes a lot of sense
because, sadly, there are a lot of reincarnated Plymouth Volares out
there just waiting to suck you dry.
Cheers,
Paul
| |
| me@privacy.net 2008-03-10, 9:25 am |
| Neon John <no@never.com> wrote:
>The Hardy stove is pretty slick.
I've always wondered if those things were viable
| |
| Steve Ackman 2008-03-10, 5:25 pm |
| In <qrr9t3lvhhhjo0mb31j5t7godbnurhr3qm@4ax.com>, on Mon, 10 Mar 2008
05:02:52 -0400, Neon John, no@never.com wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 23:58:09 -0400, Steve Ackman <steve@SNIP-THIS.twoloonscoffee.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> Daaaaaammmnnn, what part of the country do you live in, Steve?
The White Mountain Region of NH. Diesel was $3.89 at
last fill.
>
> Man, that sounds like a hard way to live.
Not really. Just wear a sweater/sweatshirt all the
time.
> Have you considered getting your walls injected with insulation?
Sure have been thinking about it. We've only lived
here for ~20 months, so things like replacing the furnace,
sliding glass doors, water heater, plumbing on the
apartment side, appliances, putting in wood/pellet stoves,
etc. etc. (it was a bank repo, so you may get an idea)
ate up all our initial improvement money.
We'll be pricing out blown in insulation this year
for sure though.
> One of my best friends lives in a house about that old and
> he's currently getting quotes from insulators for injected insulation. It is
> surprisingly economical. At your rate of fuel consumption, I bet it would pay for
> itself in a year or two.
I've looked at the d-i-y kits. They're not cheap.
I've also read that d-i-y and having it done aren't
all that different in cost.
>
> Have you tried any of the alternative fuels? I wonder how well it works.
I burned a few lbs. of green coffee beans as a test.
They burn fantastically. (I'd bet at least 9000 - 10,000
BTUs/lb. It would have to be some kind of heating
emergency to actually burn "real" beans, but I was
willing to waste a few lbs. of an ordinary Brazil I
had for the test.
Last year I saw an auction lot of 30,000 lbs. of
spoiled (some bags were moldy) robusta, but it
disappeared off the auction site before I could
investigate. My guess is somebody somewhere decided
to go ahead and roast those moldies and hope nobody
would notice. Anyway the auction ended early, with
no indication of what the final price ended up being.
I also tried burning wood chips from my chipper.
They're not as dense as pellets, nor are they uniform.
They'd work if I screened them first and would burn
better mixed 50/50 with pellets.
> I've experimented with a few alternative fuels this winter in my Buck Stove fireplace
> insert. Peanut and pecan hulls, both fairly plentiful in this area, worked quite
> well. Peanut hulls seem to work a bit better. This is a case of just shovel 'em on
> and let 'em burn. I wonder if your feeder would feed the shells if they were
> processed through a mulcher first?
Peanut hulls are soft enough they'd probably feed
without any processing. The auger is quite heavy,
and the stepper motor driving it has torque to spare.
As with cherry pits, peanut/pecan waste likely wouldn't
be economical here at present due to shipping cost.
>
> I'd wondered how that would work with pellet stoves.
Yesterday I was monitoring the register temperature
shortly after cleaning and saw ~175F with a pellet feed
rate of about 75 lbs./day. About an hour after I added
oil to the hopper, the register temp was up to 186.8F.
I know that doesn't give any idea of the actual BTUs I'm
getting from adding waste oil, but it sure makes me
feel warmer. ;-)
> I'm doing something similar
> here. I drilled a small hole, just large enough to pass a 1/4" steel line through
> the wall of my insert. A small tank hangs under the mantle. A needle valve controls
> the flow. I fill the tank with used oil, build a wood fire and then adjust the valve
> to slowly drip oil on it.
If possible, I'd position the tube to drip near where
the combustion air enters.
> I've come upon a practically unlimited supply of used oil (a
> friend with a dirt moving business and lots of heavy equipment) so I'm going to work
> out something more automatic next year. Probably some form of gravity-fed pot
> burner.
I'm sure you'll keep us aprised. ;-)
>
> Jesus! My back hurts even thinking about carrying that much fuel. How do you
> physically burn that much? Your stove must run on high fire continuously.
During Dec/Jan/Feb, yeah. I had it set to burn about
80 lbs./day. Nov/Mar average about 65 lbs./day. Oct. was about
20lbs./day.
> How does
> the heat content on a weight basis compare between pellets and cord wood? I'm trying
> to visualize that much cord wood.
Cordwood contains a lot more moisture, so it's not a
direct weight to BTU comparison. "They say" a cord runs
about 4000 to 4500 lbs. and "they say" a ton of pellets
approaches a cord in net heat content.
Our pellet stove is rated 85% efficient, and our
EPA approved kitchen wood stove is rated at 82% IIRC.
>
> What kind of stove was that?
It's a little one. Let me see if I can find a link...
http://englandsstoveworks.com/13-nc.html
And while I'm at google, here's the pellet stove we
have: https://www.usstove.com/products.php?id=2 or
for the whole manual:
https://www.usstove.com/Downloads/6039%20rev%20B.pdf
> I've never had one that required that much attention.
We didn't buy any wood this year, so when I do
fire up the kitchen stove, it's mostly with
construction crap from next door. If you load the
stove up with spruce/pine/whatever, and turn the air
down, it still burns hotter and faster than I want
just to heat the kitchen. I throw in a 16" long piece
of 2x2 say, and an equal length of 1x4, and in about a
half hour, they're nothing but coals. If I do that
about every half hour, I can keep the kitchen at a nice
70F or so all evening, without gumming up the chimney.
This year, I've also filled up milk cartons or
oatmeal boxes with pellets and thrown those in the
stove. That also gives a faster and hotter burn than
an equivalent log.
> My old Ashley required maybe 3 fuelings a day. My homemade wood furnace held a day's
> worth. My current Buck insert needs 3-4 fuelings, depending on the outside
> temperature. Its firebox is quite small.
If I load it up with hardwood before bed and cut
back the air, the surface of the stove is still warm
to the touch in the morning, and the kitchen is the
warmest room in the house.
> Ashes get cleaned maybe twice a week. I sift my ashes to recover the charcoal.
> My sifter is a coal shovel with the floor cut out and
I use a kitty litter scoop.
>
> Have you had that oil burner tuned up lately?
The manual tells the service guy to adjust the air
to get a "number 2 smoke". I don't know how much
that means exactly, but it's definitely visible.
> It might pay you to do so, as a
> properly tuned burner won't smoke at all except a little at ignition.
Well, I guess it depends on whose definition of
"properly tuned" you go by. It would seem the folks
who write the manuals for Newmac have a different
idea about that.
> Back to the OP's question. Before settling on a fuel, I suggest two things. One,
> investigate having your walls insulated with one of the spray-in technologies.
> Regardless of the amount of fuel you burn, you won't be truly comfortable until you
> do that. Cold floors, drafts and all that.
>
> Second, evaluate your local market to see which fuel is cheapest. Around here it is
> cord wood, the going rate for mixed hardwood being around $80/cord.
Man! What is that? 12 foot lengths before the
additional delivery charge?
> I've learned
> from this group that folks elsewhere pay a LOT more so it wouldn't hurt to check
> around.
Last year we got seasoned-cut-split-delivered for
$200. Oil went up... Wood went up. You couldn't find
any seasoned this past fall for less than $250 and that
was picking it up yourself. (I found green available
for $190 delivered) Ironic that we're on the border of
"The Great North Woods" and wood is so expensive.
Pellets were $235 until about the middle of February
when they dropped to $205. No matter what sector of
the energy market you're talking about, it's all
highly volatile.
| |
| GeekBoy 2008-03-14, 5:25 pm |
| And don't forget about the pellet shortage a couple of years ago and people
could not heat their homes with them.
What about you do if that happened?
"Paul M. Eldridge" <paul.eldridge@ns.sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:d2aat3hk0ahrnne5f97idrr1j5fis3ln7i@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:43:46 -0700 (PDT), Mash <mashman74@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Mash,
>
> I'm not a huge fan of pellet stoves for several reasons -- while they
> do offer some advantages over wood log, pellet stoves require
> electricity to operate, they're mechanically complicated and
> potentially trouble-prone, and they're fairly fussy in terms of the
> quality of their fuel (e.g., moisture content must be kept low and
> pellet size must be uniform). Because these machines have two or
> three motors, an electronic control board, an igniter, photo eye and
> various mechanical components that are susceptible to ash and dust
> build-up through the course of normal use, they do require a thorough
> cleaning/tune-up at least once a year. Budget between $150.00 to
> $200.00 a year for a professional service call if you don't feel
> comfortable doing this work yourself -- that's an expense that could
> easily wipe-out 15 to 25 per cent of the expected savings right off
> the bat. In addition, most stoves must be shutdown once a day/every
> other day so that ash and clinker build-up within the combustion
> chamber can be removed. Likewise, you'll need to clean the venting
> about every fifty bags and, trust me, this is not something you can
> ignore. Due to their constant neediness and often temperamental
> behaviour, I refer to these products as the "Plymouth Volare of
> heating technologies".
>
> In any event, depending upon the sap content of the pellet, you net
> about 275,000 BTUs of heat from a 40-lb bag (i.e., 8,600 BTUs/lb x 40
> lbs. x 0.80 combustion efficiency = 275,200 BTUs). One gallon of
> heating oil provides you with 139,000 BTUs (gross) and typically
> between 97,000 and 118,000 BTUs net, as determined by the efficiency
> of your furnace. In most cases, one bag of pellets will displace
> about 2.5 gallons of heating oil. If this home consumes 860 gallons
> of fuel oil, that's the equivalent of 344 bags or just about 7 tons.
>
> Locally, we pay about $4.80 per bag for a premium quality pellet/$240
> per ton, so 7 tons would cost you about $1,680.00. At $3.30 per
> gallon, 860 gallons of oil will set you back $2,838.00, so the
> difference is $1,158.00. It's unlikely you could displace all of your
> heating oil demand (some parts of the house will always need a little
> extra heat), so your actual savings might come in closer to $800.00 a
> year, and if you do have your stove professionally cleaned and
> serviced at the end of the heating season, $600.00.
>
> Also, does this 860 gallons cover-off domestic hot water use? If this
> home has an oil-fired water heater -- and that's fairly common of
> older homes with oil furnaces -- your space heating consumption might
> fall in the range of 700 gallons/year with the balance being DHW
> related, in which case your net savings could be 20 per cent lower
> than what's estimated here.
>
> Lastly, a good quality name brand pellet stove, hearth pad, vent pipe
> and installation by a certified technician is probably going to run in
> the range of $3,500.00, so your simple pay back is likely to be
> anywhere from four to seven years, assuming the spread between both
> fuels stays roughly the same. It's not uncommon for a control board,
> auger motor or combustion fan to fail over that time span and one or
> more service calls could seriously eat into your savings. This is one
> of those products where an extended warranty plan makes a lot of sense
> because, sadly, there are a lot of reincarnated Plymouth Volares out
> there just waiting to suck you dry.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
| |
| Paul M. Eldridge 2008-03-14, 8:25 pm |
| On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:28:11 -0500, "GeekBoy" <abuse@zedz.net> wrote:
>And don't forget about the pellet shortage a couple of years ago and people
>could not heat their homes with them.
>What about you do if that happened?
There have been ongoing spot shortages and the winter of '05/'06 was a
particularly tough time for pellet suppliers and their customers.
It's also sometimes difficult to find pellets towards the latter part
of the heating season because by that point retailers have already
moved on to their spring lines; if you run short, you may have to hunt
high and low to find them or just go without.
Lately I've been reading about supply issues related to the downturn
in the housing market -- with fewer new homes being built and thus
less lumber being milled, there's less sawdust to process into pellet
fuel. This could make the supply situation next winter even more
interesting (due to volume and weight, it's expensive to supply
outside markets that may be experiencing shortages, and diverting
supplies to these adjoining markets can negatively impact supply and
price locally, in which case there could be enough pain to go around
for everyone).
My advice? Forget about pellet and get yourself a good quality
ductless heat pump.
Cheers,
Paul
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