Pellet Stoves
I live in the basement of our new house. It’s a finished basement, more like a studio apartment. Open floor and only closets that house the utilities, plus a full bath. Maybe I’ll get pictures later when I’ve cleared the boxes out of here.
Now being in a basement means you don’t have to worry about A/C that much, cold air settles down + the ground ussually helps to keep it cool. Now it’s winter, and the full windows on the south-side and not-so-great insulation is beginning to become a issue.
I have a Quadrafire pellet stove - and it puts out a lot of heat. The issue is controlling the heat output on it. It takes a long time to “warm up” [10 minutes] and only after that it begins to put out heat. It’s totally automatic and uses a fan to blow air through a heat extchanger inside the stove. The problem with that is it’s warm-up cycle, it’s already hot after 2 minutes, but it continues to waste pellets for 8 more minutes before spewing out heat. [Just to note: The thing is useless without that fan running, all other panels on the thing are insulated in some way, so it doesn't radiate heat much at all] It might help to maintain the heat level if it had a thermostat, but the one that came with it was likely wireless [according to the control box on it], which disappeared before we got the house.
Next issue is the fuel, which obviously is wood pellets. Buying in bulk you can get wood pellets for $11 a bag [40 pounds a bag]. The bag would last about a full day if the stove runs continously [24 hours], at the momet I just run it for 20 minutes at a time to warm the place up once or twice a day. With it getting colder, I think I may need to run it for longer. The past 3 weeks running it, I’ve used 3/4 of one bag, running it about 20 minutes a day. That usage definately will be increasing soon. I’m up in the mountains and the nights already drop down to the 50s and apparently will be in the 40s next week.
One thing I’ve been playing with is the speed control on the back, which seems to also control the vent fan and feed motor. [Feed motor = shoves pellets into the "fire pot" of the stove] Starting it up on low speed till the 10 minutes pass then turning it to high [which burns a bit more efficently] seems to save a few pellets.
I have 2 bags left, and how cold it’s been getting, the remaining bags probally won’t last the rest of the month.
One thing I’ve been trying to work out is if it’s cheaper then electric heat. Buying from a store, the bags probably cost $15-$20 for a 40 pound bag [$11 in bulk, as mentioned above]. If it runs on high all day, it will probably use a entire bag. If it runs 20 minutes a day on high [as I've been doing], then the bag lasts a bit around a month. I’ll need to keep track of it a bit more to figure out my exact usage on it.
I’m surprised how little ash this thing puts out. The ash tray has a small stack of ash [about a cup] from burning what I’ve put in it and from what was in it when we got the house [which I estimate was half a bag]. So cleanup isn’t that hard, maybe vacuuming out the fire box every once and again won’t hurt.
Well, there’s your blog entry for the week.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:35 am
[...] been 2 months since I last wrote about pellet stoves. I’ve gone through 24 bags of pellets since winter started here. [each bag is 40 pounds, [...]