woodstove or pellet stove

[dverna]

Hardwood firewood is about $50-70 per face cord here. I use a wood fireplace and propane furnace for normal heating. In addition, there is a propane fireplace in the basement in case the power goes out and we are not home. I heat a 450 sq ft shop and 1600 sg ft house.

A pellet or wood heater is not a good choice if you are absent for even two days. You need to keep the water lines from freezing.

[Lloyd Smale]

brings up a valid point. If you aren't home every day you need a back up source of heat. So you not only have to factor in the price of your wood stove but also a propane/natural gas furnace or at least some electric heat. Up here it gets COLD and 12 hours without heat and you can start freezing up. Even using my high effiecentcy gas furnace I keep one of the cheap non vented wall furnaces on a stand with an adapter the will go on a grill propane bottle so if the power goes out I can keep some heat in the house. Don't use it much anymore since I put in the back up generator. But if were going to be away for a couple days I put that unit in the living room with the thermostat down low so if the power does go out it will kick on because I don't have one of those fancy automatic generators.

Hardwood firewood is about $50-70 per face cord here. I use a wood fireplace and propane furnace for normal heating. In addition, there is a propane fireplace in the basement in case the power goes out and we are not home. I heat a 450 sq ft shop and 1600 sg ft house.

A pellet or wood heater is not a good choice if you are absent for even two days. You need to keep the water lines from freezing.

[Mk42gunner]

Pellet stoves are noisy.

I heated with a multi fuel stove for four or five years; when corn was cheap I used that, when pellets were cheaper I used them. I got more useable heat out of corn, after learning its burning idiosyncrasies. A bag of pellets or a five gallon bucket of corn is easier than carrying firewood inside.

I usually saved a bit of money over using propane, until you factor in having to replace one of four electric motors on the stove every year at from $100-130 a pop.

I finally got tired of it and went back to using propane for my primary heat, much easier and quieter.

Robert

[Battis]

I have an oil furnace that's less than 10 yrs old. I have steam radiators in the house but the wood has been the primary heat source since 1984. I bought a new oil tank last spring - tanks aren't cheap but a leaking tank can be expensive. Anyways, I like the wood stove but the price of wood is actually more than oil. I can see wood going over $300 a cord in the near future. I have enough for this winter but I'll take another look at pellet stoves in the spring. Harmon is the best from what I've been told, but expensive. There's some used ones on Craigslist.
Many loggers around here were taking their wood to the mills in northern NH, probably Berlin, where they could get top dollar. There's a local wood supplier that deals only with a pizza place that uses a wood fired oven. He charges them about $360 a cord.
Bring on global warming. Five or so miles to go and I'll have beach front property.

[dverna]

It is a bit silly, but I like heating with wood. I like building a fire in the morning and keeping it going. Enjoy the smell when I go outside and enjoy viewing the flames through the glass door and the smoke rising out of the chimney. I have a Xtraordinair insert and it works very well.

Doing firewood helps keep me in shape but at 68 I know I cannot do it forever.....maybe another 10 years? I needed to replace my furnace this year and came close to getting a pellet furnace but decided to install a new propane HE unit. Lugging around bags of pellets is in some ways worse than firewood. Bags are 40 lbs and I would need to haul them down to the basement then carry the ash upstairs. My wood rack is in the garage about 40 ft from the fireplace and I can carry less than 40 lbs at a trip. During breaks in the weather, I move wood from storage to the garage.

A few weeks ago, I experimented with a wood storage rack made from pallets (I get them free). It holds just under 2/3 of a face cord and I can move the unit with a carry all on the 3pt hitch on my tractor. The plan is to make up 25 of these units next year. They will be filled as the wood is split and the pallet will be placed on cinder blocks so it does not freeze to the ground. The pallets will be staged outdoors and tarped to season the wood and I will move a months worth (6 units - four face cords ) into the garage as needed.

This will eliminate a lot of handling. Currently, I move wood from where it is cut, split it near the storage area, and stack it. Then it is loaded into the bed of the pick up and stacked again in the garage. With the pallet system, I can split wood anywhere I can get the tractor to (no need to move rounds), stack it in the pallets once, and use the tractor to move them into the garage.

Another option I looked at was using IBC tote cages. I cannot find a local source and most cost about $35-50. I made the wooden pallet unit in about 1/2 hr using scrap and a handful of screws. Now that I know what I want, they should take about 15 minutes to make. They should last at least 4-5 years.

[MrWolf]

Nice idea with using pallets. Thanks.

[KCSO]

Downside Pellets are not free, Upside you don't have to split pellets.

[Mr_Sheesh]

Or if you do, you can split 'em fast and easy, and a butter knife will do the job

[Hossfly]

And after the pallets wear out just bust them up and burn them to.

[rancher1913]

I use the ibc totes to store wood, local factory gives them away. started out removing the liner and just using the cages but found that wood slips through the wire cages sometimes, so now just cut out the top and fill. I can stack 2 high with no problems and move one to the back door as needed.

[FISH4BUGS]

It is a bit silly, but I like heating with wood. I like building a fire in the morning and keeping it going. Enjoy the smell when I go outside and enjoy viewing the flames through the glass door and the smoke rising out of the chimney. .

Gee.....nice to know I'm not the only one

[Down South]

I never had the pleasure of having a pellet heater. I used wood all the yrs that I had a fireplace. My wood was free as I owned the property and cut it myself. I even upgraded to a hydraulic wood splitter as I got older.
I lost that house to a lightening strike several yrs ago and now live in another house I own. It has one of those fake propane fireplaces in it but it will warm the entire downstairs of my house.

[Down South]

brings up a valid point. If you aren't home every day you need a back up source of heat. So you not only have to factor in the price of your wood stove but also a propane/natural gas furnace or at least some electric heat. Up here it gets COLD and 12 hours without heat and you can start freezing up. Even using my high effiecentcy gas furnace I keep one of the cheap non vented wall furnaces on a stand with an adapter the will go on a grill propane bottle so if the power goes out I can keep some heat in the house. Don't use it much anymore since I put in the back up generator. But if were going to be away for a couple days I put that unit in the living room with the thermostat down low so if the power does go out it will kick on because I don't have one of those fancy automatic generators.

I used to be gone for a month at a time every month, just coming in one weekend each month. I have electric central heat that I could control through a WiFi thermostat. We don't have much freezing weather but when we do and I was away from home, I could turn the unit on and set the temp down low from a remote location.
I have a whole home generator now since I retired and I'm at home most all the time now. It is automatic on/off. I ran a few nights ago when we had a storm come come through and knocked the power out.

[Lloyd Smale]

How many square feet and how long about could you heat your home on a 100lb bag of corn in 0 F?

Pellet stoves are noisy.

I heated with a multi fuel stove for four or five years; when corn was cheap I used that, when pellets were cheaper I used them. I got more useable heat out of corn, after learning its burning idiosyncrasies. A bag of pellets or a five gallon bucket of corn is easier than carrying firewood inside.

I usually saved a bit of money over using propane, until you factor in having to replace one of four electric motors on the stove every year at from $100-130 a pop.

I finally got tired of it and went back to using propane for my primary heat, much easier and quieter.

Robert

[justashooter]

i have a 200 year old farmhouse in the Harrisburg PA area. it has baseboard electric in zones that i got for free and installed 20 years ago as a stopgap, a propane 98% forced air that costs about $2500 a year, if i am stupid enuf to run it, and a hand fired Warm Morning hard coal stove that i use for 90% of my heating needs. local anthracite is $210 a ton delivered, and i have a feed chute next to the kitchen porch into a 6X6X6 (4 ton) sheet metal coal bin 5 steps from the stove in the back basement that gravity gates into a scuttle. i feed it twice a day, and remove ash every other day. otherwise, forget about it, until you walk over the draft grate...$800 a year for a drafty old 3000 square foot 3 story farmhouse with 37 leaky windows and 7 doors.

coal is not great when the temp stays above 55* in the daytime, and takes some understanding to run correctly, but it's much less work than any other solid fuel, with a much higher BTU value per ton. if you have it trucked to site and power-fed into your bin right next to the stove, it's easy to use. it also eats galvanized exhaust pipe if you leave it in place over the summer months when the humidity allows the sulphur in the coal dust to rot right thru your pipe.

hard coal ash is mostly calcium, sulphur, and silica powder, so it's great for traction on the icy winter driveway. 4 tons of hard coal (anthracite) makes about 60 gallons of ash, give or take.

the downside is that you have to live within economical trucking of a breaker, and that EPA regs have made coal fired heat equipment expensive. lots of 1970 or earlier hand feds are still in use and can occasionally be bought for a song. i paid $200 for mine 10 years ago.

[MaryB]

How many square feet and how long about could you heat your home on a 100lb bag of corn in 0 F?

My 1600 square foot house uses ~ 50 pounds of corn a day at -20f. Natural gas furnace may cycle 3-4 times during the day just to make sure pipes don't freeze(I have a timer setting on the thermostat).

[popper]

Rock salt is supposed to reduce the creosote buildup.

[Lloyd Smale]

that's not bad for that many square feet. Figure corn is about 12 bucks a 100 here and a bit of electricity and your probably spending about 7 bucks a day to heat. I would have guessed at least twice that. I heat about the same square footage if you include my sons apartment. I use propane and am on a budget plan that cost me about 1500 bucks a year. So even if you figure 6 months of the year that I need heat that comes to about 250 a month during the cold season which works out to about the same but im sure on -20 days im using more and 40 degree days your using much less corn. Whats a years worth of corn set you back for an average winter?

My 1600 square foot house uses ~ 50 pounds of corn a day at -20f. Natural gas furnace may cycle 3-4 times during the day just to make sure pipes don't freeze(I have a timer setting on the thermostat).

[snowwolfe]

We use wood from our property. I have never had to cut down a tree as mother nature seems to push over a few big oaks every year. I buck it and wife helps me split and stack it. We have at least a 3 years supply. Not sure if we would use pellets if we had to buy fuel as wood just smells nice and like looking at the flames through the clear door.
Funny how the price varies so much from location to location. There are at least a dozen mature oaks that are down right now and all within driving distance of a ATV or UTV yet we can't even give it away.

[yeahbub]

We have a wood furnace that is integrated into the forced air system for the heat pump. Close off two ducts and open two others and fire up the furnace. Been doing that since 1975, just in time for those crazy cold winters and it kept the house toasty. We have some acreage and the wood is ours for the work involved, which we enjoy. Until it's at freezing or below, the heat pump can handle it, but after that it seems to run all the time, so wood heat is the answer. Very satisfying to feel that hot air coming out of the vents. We clean the flue with that "chimney sweep" stuff that comes in a sour cream tub, throw a scoop on the embers and all the creosote peels like old paint and falls into the flue pit. The furnace is capable of convection heat and will warm the house even should the power fail but without the blower or thermostat control so someone would have to be there. That said, I wonder about the greater automation of a pellet system. At the same time, I wouldn't want to be dependent on a supply I'm not in charge of. I hear about these price swings for pellets, but I guess it's like groceries or other things. There was once "chip stoves", which handled and burned wood that had been run through a chipper instead of pellets, often free for the taking rom the vast piles at city or county dumps. I don't hear much about them anymore, but it would save a heap of cutting/splitting/hauling/stacking, etc to get a truck-bed of chipped Christmas trees free and fill the hopper. Is anyone familiar with these? It might be another option.