Is There A Pellet Stove on My Horizon?

There are many highly efficient stoves and fireplaces on the market today. They are designed to be room heaters, and some are used to heat entire houses. You can purchase an efficient gas unit, pellet stove, or wood burning unit. You will want to examine which fuel is the most economical and suitable for your lifestyle. It's a lot easier to haul small bags of pellets up a set of stairs than a load of wood, for example.

Pellet stoves and fireplaces are becoming more popular in today's economy. Some hardware stores and grocery stores stock the pellets for these stoves and make this fuel very convenient to purchase. Wood pellets come in 40 pound bags and some people even buy pellets by the ton. A ton of pellets takes up a space of only four feet high x four feet wise x four feet deep.

Pellet stoves and fireplaces offer ease of operation. A blower circulates the heat throughout the area that you are heating. Some pellet stoves operate from a thermostat or even from a remote with a thermostat making the amount of heat very easy to control. They act like a furnace because you can keep the temperature of the room they are in or your entire home right at the temperature you prefer.

Cleaning pellet stoves is so much easier than cleaning a woodstove. The ashes from a pellet stove fall into a pot and are easily discarded. After burning ten bags of pellets, you should follow the manufacturer's maintenance guide to clean both the firepot and hopper areas. Generally, the unit needs to be vacuumed. Using the yardstick of 1) annual maintenance or 2) after burning two tons of pellets, you should inspect the chimney and clean the exhaust blowers. All of this is a lot easier than dealing with daily ashes.

The decision to purchase a pellet stove depends upon the following factors:

1) Power Outages in Your Area. Pellet stoves depend upon electricity to start the fire, circulate the heat, and exhaust the fumes. Approximately 400 watts are used in the startup and it takes 180 watts for operation of the stove.

2) Installation. If you have a two-story home and you don't want to run a lot of pipe or a chimney, a pellet stove or fireplace can exhaust straight out the wall. This is also an easy after-market installation. If you have an existing fireplace, you can install a pellet insert inside the fireplace opening and run a three or four inch pipe up your flue.

3) Ease of Operation. Pellets are easier to deal with than wood. Pellets must be stored in a dry area. You can fill the hopper in your stove full and there is no need to store less-than-beautiful bags of pellets on your hearth. Depending upon the size of your pellet unit, the size of your home, and the outside temperature, pellet stoves burn 1.7 to 5.5 pounds per hour. The thermostat on the wall or your remote control shuts the unit off and on. You won't have to refuel your pellet stove in the middle of the night as you would with a woodstove.

4) Cleaning. As discussed earlier, the cleaning of a pellet stove is very simple and not required daily.

Hearth and Home, a southern California fireplace shop in Riverside, has used only a pellet stove to heat one end of their display showcase for years.

"There are a lot of good reasons to consider a pellet stove," I tell my clients. "In California, we have homes with high ceilings which keep a home cool year round. Many of our homes are two stories. These features create an opportunity for zone heating. It is easy to keep only one zone warm and much less expensive to do zone heating versus whole house heating. Many of our southern California homes already have fireplaces. Folks are adding pellet inserts into their existing fireplaces because they are more economical."