wood stoves and the EPA

I have a Prometheus basket that burns pellets in my regular woodstove. Very nice. No mess, easy to light and doesn't need electricity. Pellets here are $150 to $200 per ton, I'll need 2 to 2 1/2 tons for the winter. Even at the high end thats just $500 to get me to May. Last year the propane furnace was costing $300 every six weeks. I like the pellets alot better!

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Wood-pellet/corn stoves are fine if you can't cut your own wood, have a highly reliable electrical source and figure you will be gone for at least a day at a time from your home. However, buring a manufactured pellet fuel or animal feed corn doesn't make much sense to me.

Manufactured fuels have a price that rise and fall with the market forces and are controlled by availability by the producer.

My wood stove burns and moves the heat around without the need for any electricity. I cut my deadfalls and stack it up for not much more than the gasoline and oil for the chainsaw. The stove also has extra concrete block, stone and salvaged granite pieces to add heat sink mass to radiate after the burn completes.

If I have to, I can cut the wood by hand.

It isn't super clean burning, but it works jsut fine for me.

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http://www.lopistoves.com/

here's a link to those stoves. i see they have fireplace inserts too, which may be more doable at this house.

thanks for the heads up!

When I started burning wood, many, many cords ago, one of the reasons I did was so that I wouldn't have to rely on someone else (oil company, pellet producer, etc) for my heat. When I bought my stove the feller tried to sell me a pellet stove, I told him that if I could go into the backyard and cut pellets I might consider it. No thanks, I'll stick with the regular wood stove

I had seen these baskets in Real Goods catalog some time ago. Interesting but kinda pricey just to experiment/gamble since I have plenty of firewood available. Mentioned them to couple people sometime back who were wanting cheap way to burn pellets but I told them that I didnt know how well they worked. Figured it would be less efficient than being burned in a regular pellet stove but still an alternative. Glad to hear it actually works fairly well. I did wonder if one of those baskets could be used to burn corn instead of pellets. As people discover this area and move here, going to eventually force me to move, maybe to an area with few trees but where corn could be grown. I hate idea of having to buy heating fuel and being under the thumb of those that sell it, though there is always a cost involved one way or another however one heats.

Just curious, what kind of wood stove do you have, what size is the basket and how long between refuelings?

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"What would you do with a brain if you had one?" -Dorothy

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Read all the posts put up on this subject and I still maintain that the pellet stove is better alternative. This is not my first one. I paid 1.79 a 40 lb. bag for my pellets a month ago and I checked yesterday and they are the same price. I will heat my home for under 500 this winter, totally.

Just my pesonal preference and as a woman alone, <I can easily lift 40 lbs.....moved 2.5 tons of pellets the last 2 days to my new shed > I prefer the bagged easy to move pellets. Just my plan for ease of winter heating and it works for me. I need to not have some bring me wood, stack it, keep it dry < not a biggie> and then carry logs into the house, making a mess, and have to do it all the time.....I just pour in a bag of pellets and it llast almost 2 days........clean the stove 2 x a week and that takes 10 minutes after stove cools down, which is within 15 min. entire procedure is about half hour and I am up and running again.

Pellets, wood, propane <VERY expensive here> gas, oil, whatever.....all a personal choice.

I like the pellet stoves, but "ouch" $500 to heat for the season?? We bought a ton of coal for $120 and the wood costs us the fuel in the chainsaw. We heat all winter with coal & wood. I have new neighbors behind me this year, so will wait for complaints about smoke in the air, but tough on them. Nothing better than the smell of wood smoke in the crisp fall air.

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Cindy in PA

2.5 tons of pellets is approximately equal to the weight of one full cord of firewood at 0% moisture. Consequently, I would speculate that the heat value (BTUs) in that 2.5 tons of pellets in roughly equivalent (or slightly more) that the heat value of one cord of wood. What this suggests to me is that a pellet stove is extremely effieicent if you can heat a house for an entire season using the equivalent of one cord of firewood. Of course, firewood is never at 0% moisture, so part of its heat value is used up to just evaporate that moisture.

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