Pellets vs Wood

   / Pellets vs Wood #1  
Piperflyer

Piperflyer

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I'm burning wood now for partial heat in my home (woodstove insert). With as many times as you handle wood, I'm thinking of putting in a pellet stove insert and getting rid of the wood stove. Good or bad idea? I'm thinking about cost, handling, ease of use, etc.
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #2  
I like pellets for these reasons, and prbably a few more that I can't think of right now:

Cleaner than wood
Less labor involved
Simple ON/OFF and thermostat control
Wife can even do it by herself if I am away
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #3  
I think the biggest question is how many btu's/hour you need. There seems to be a limit around 50,000 btu/hr give or take some for pellet stoves... or at least there was 5 years ago when I bought mine. Woodstoves can easily produce way more btu's/hour.

In the dead of winter, like now, mine is running wide open 24x7 and it burns about 2.5 bags per day so you still handle stuff almost as often as a wood stove. Much, much cleaner though. I have a wood stove in my shop and I always forget how messy it can be.

Some of the newer stoves are supposed to have much better thermostatic control. Mine has 3 manual heat settings and a wall thermostat to turn it on/off. It takes a while to cold start again and start producing heat after the thermostat shuts it off. The newer ones are supposed to drop down to the lowest heat setting for a bit before they shutdown completely so if the thermostat calls for heat again they just start back up. This would be a great feature in my opinion.
 
   / Pellets vs Wood
  • Thread Starter
#4  
What is the best models of pellet insert stove out there. I would be looking for the biggest BTU ones?
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #5  
The answer will depend on alot of things.

Last year we bought a pellet stove when heating oil was $5 / gal. We have also been heating with a wood stove for years. If you are used to wood heat, and are looking for a similar heat output from pellets, you will be very disappointed. I'm with Ken on the pluses of pellets, but the minuses are:

Much less heat output
Convection heater, so it only warms the air in the room(s) close to the stove. It will not warm everything around it to 90 degrees like a wood stove.
There are lots of sub-standard pellets out there. Unfortunately, buying a ton then finding out they are junk can be a big waste of money.
I found my pellet stove required more maintanence than my woodstove.
This year pellets are the biggest rip-off in heating (price-wise)..... with the possible exception being propane. At least in my area.

Unfortunately, the answer to your questions will require you to spend a bunch of money and see if pellets are right for you. My advice is...... DON'T sell your woodstove just yet.

I may run my pellet stove a small amount this year, but only because it warms our livingroom..... the room farthest away from our wood stove. And.... i will definitely keep mine, and keep it ready to go. If the pellet gougers (who do they think they are........ OPEC???????) lower their prices to make them a viable heat source again, i will burn them again. Personally...... i really like that we now have three options for heat in the winter: oil, wood, and pellets.
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #6  
I just did put in a pellet stove in November. I did some research and a great source of information is Hearth dot com forum. The one theme of complaints across the board is the lack of warranty response from the dealers and various makes and model either out of production or no longer being carried by the dealers and the dealers seem come and go out of the business. This is what I did. I bought a used, older mid ninetys, Whitfield Advantage II freestanding stove. It has NO warranty, but parts seem to be available on Ebay and from the local vendors and on Hearth web site some good support in manuals and trouble shooting guides. These pellet stoves are reasonalby simple to work on if your at all mechanically inclined and will perform very well with a tenth of the cost of a new one (I gave $200). Now for the bad news. The flu pipe cost $400 for a ten foot run up out of the basement and horizontal discharge and I did the installation myself. Pellet stove Flu pipe is very expensive. My stove with the cheapest pellets I can find ,$190 a ton, has to have the burn grate and pot dumped cleaned about twice a day. The printed circuit control board if it goes out would cost between $250-$330 depending on source. There are two blower motors that could go out $125-$175 apiece. There are a couple of heat sensor switches and pressure switch in the circuit also. When I got mine I had to completely disassemble and vacuum clean behind the fire brick wall and take apart both blowers and clean the housings and the round caged blades. Oh yeah, mine had a bent flu dampner handle that wouldn't let the dampener plate close completely once I straightened that out the stove work wonderully. This is maintenance that should be done on any stove a person gets recomended once a year. A long post I know but a fair review. bjr
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #7  
Our pellet prices went down along with the other energy prices... back to about 2005 prices.

I was looking at alternate heat because we are on propane which went up a crazy amount. I mainly choose pellets because we had an open hearth fireplace but the hearth etc. was not built big enough to handle a wood insert and would have cost me a fortune to have wood floors redone to expand the mantle etc. so I chose pellets. That and I would have to listen to my wife every winter about the 'mess'. :rolleyes: Otherwise I probably would have gone wood for the better heat output.

These days if I had to do it all over again I would take a hard look at geothermal. There's been a lot of geothermal info posted on here and elsewhere that just wasn't available at the time.
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #8  
IMO there is no single correct answer for everyone, too many variables.

We also changed from a wood stove (insert) to a pellet stove insert. For us, no regrets. We had a large wood burning insert. Handled 24” logs with firebox running fore and aft. Even with the fire box orientation the insert was 4 ft wide. It did have a large squirrel cage fan, ~600 cu/ft/min. For us, the pellet stove offers us better, more consistent heat.

Fuel cost is one of those variables which may or may not be the most important. All depend upon some of the other benefits of a pellet stove offers and how important that is to you.

Nothing I can disagree with from Kennyd on what he sees as benefits.

Pellet stoves are somewhat limited in heat output and somewhat small fans and your home and locale will determine if a single pellet stove can handle the need. Our stove offers 5 different manual heat settings. This cold spell we’re coming off, I didn’t need to run the stove any higher than mid-point. I have a programmable t-stat connected to my stove. The t-stat controls temp to +/- one degree, which doesn’t mean room temp will be controlled to that extent. Due to reaction time, room temp is controlled to abt 2-3 degrees. My stove is getting close to 10 yrs old. With the t-stat control, when heat is not longer called for the stove shuts down to sub-lowest manual setting. Since stove never really shut off, it doesn’t cool down much and can recover quite quickly. We do find with stove running nearly 24-7 during the winter months, we appreciate the consistent warmth it provides. The biggest maintenance needed is to keep the ash box empty. Ash box size and qlty of the pellets you use will determine how frequently clean-out is needed. Our stove has a somewhat small ash box but with decent pellets we only need to clean out the ash every 3-4 days.

Wood offers abt 8 - 8.5 k BTU’s per lb. This past week with daytime temps in high 20’s and nighttime temps abt 10-15, we were going through 50 - 60# of pellets a day.

This past summer I did pull the pellet stove for a good cleaning as I wasn’t pleased with last years performance. Blew all the exterior dust off the stove, pulled the exhaust fan and cleaned the blades that had a fair amount of crud stuck to the blades. Blew out all the internal passages for exhaust gases and found there was a lot of ash debris trapped in there. Also oiled both of the blower motors. Took abt 3 hrs for the whole operation including cleaning out the chimney pipe. When comparing all the ash clean out on the wood stove Vs what I’ve had to do with the pellet stove, IMO the nod goes to the pellet stove. Oh, the stove is performing MUCH better than last yr.

You’ll have to decide which kind of stove works best for you. Have to weigh fuel costs and benefits to make an informed decision.
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #9  
Way cleaner, but you will miss that deep IR(infa-red) heating associated with a woodstove wall that is heated to a few hundred degrees.

Probably one of the most overlooked things is airflow design in the pellet stove. You want the combustion air to be entirely ducted to a single point that can be directly connected to an outside vent. If not, and the combustion air is drawn from the room, you have just made a vacume cleaner. The pellet stove consumes a very large ammount of air for it's small hot lean and clean burning fire. If you are pumping this large ammount of air out of the building, it will be made up by drawing in a ton of cold air thru every possible crack in your outer walls and around doors. I did not make the best choice in stoves, and the combustion air was not ducted to a single point. Our first seasons use, was not real good. You could feel the cold air being pulled into the house. I think we probably sucked in as much cold air as we heated. The following summer, I stripped the stove down and welded in some additional plumbing to get the air to a single point, and welded all the seams on the firebox and heat exchanger so ALL the combustion air came from a single point, which I connected to an outside air duct. The second years use was much more comfortable, and it has been working well ever since these modifications.

This was whitfield pellet stove, but shortly after they were bought out by Lennox. All the diagrams were still the original ones by Whitfield, but I think Lennox shifted the design somewhat to streamline production. All the diagrams from whitfield showed the combustion airsupply to a single duct. The ones I looked at had a single air suply duct inthe back of the case(case back also had louvers) In actual practice on the stove I received, there was a duct to the rear of the cabinet, but it was a piece of pipe about 3" long that did not goto anything, just into the case, which is about as air tight as a screen door... This was not readilly apparent unless you opened the stove side panels, so buyer beware.

The best one I came across, and the one I should have bought was made by these folks. Enviro - Quality Fireplaces, Freestanding Stoves and Fireplace Inserts in Gas, Wood and Pellet

Good Luck
 
   / Pellets vs Wood #10  
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