PLAYING WITH FIRE
Many enquires have been asked of me and my pellet stove experience.
We have been having our fuel crunch alternative energies discussions lately
so I have been the hot topic with my pellet stove.
I went to WOODYs in WilkesBarre PA with my wife in September 2004 and the
mission was to buy a coal stove to end our oil heating for ever.
We went to WOODY's because we didn't know any other source for stoves and
later found one closer in Tamaqua called Stoves and Stuff.
We know a few pea coal stove users so we thought we wanted a pea coal stove.
The owner at WOODY's was certain that a pellet stove would be much better to fit
our needs and he showed us some really nice pellet stoves and fired up a pellet stove
to show us how it was thermostat controlled and how pellet stoves have changed over the years.
The mechanics were very simple. There was a hopper with an auger screw that screwed the pellets
up a tube where they then fell into a fire tray.
The auger screwed very slowly. The auger screwed on and off with more time off than time on.
This screw was controlled by a computer control board that change by setting for low medium and high.
Older pellet stoves had a fire box that you opened up and you lit the pellers on fire to start
the fire.
The new pellet stoves came with a fire starting device that will ignite the pellets without
you opening the fire box door at all. These new automatic starting stoves then became
thermostat and computer controlled and you could heat up a room and when it was warm enough
then the thermostat would kick and the auger screw would stop feeding pellets altogether and
burn out the fire and go cold until the room temperature cooled off to a point that caused
the thermostat to kick on and automaticly start up a new fire.
This thermostat control will add $500 to the price of a new pellet stove.
You can still buy the old style pellet stoves but the new automatic start stoves seem to
be more and more the expected standard.
If you use the old style pellet stove and the fire is kept burning all the time then you
may end up burning 80 pounds of pellets in 24 hours instead of 40 pounds of pellets.
And thats money you could have been saving in fuel costs so I highly recommend that you
do invest in the thermostat controlled pellet stove model.
My wife fell in love with a tiny pellet stove model and we shopped around for this one model
and while poking around on the internet we found many pellet stove dealers.
It seems that anyone who sells pools and hot tubs and spas has become a pellet stove dealer also.
Someone convinced us that we did not want that tiny pellet stove because we would be running out
of heat and go cold in half a day because the hopper was small and convinced us to buy a standard
sized pellet stove. Well then it was just a matter of shopping around and we ended up purchasing
a Whitfield Profile 20 FS-2 from stovesdirect.com
It turned out that stovesdirect had prices that were by far much cheaper than our local pellet stove
dealers. The stovesdirect.com price was so far less than my local dealer that
we spent the price difference on the pellets that heated the house for the entire winter.
Stovesdirect.com sent us everything we needed to install the pellet stove ourselves.
The pellet stove is screwed to a pallet base and was shipped to a nearby warehouse.
A friend of mine with a van picked up the pellet stove for me. The screwed pallet base
made it easy to forklift into the van. The screwed pallet base made for safe shipping
and once we got it home it unscrewed easily and we two people carried it into the house
and me and my friend are small , little guys. We ain't no linebackers.
The pellet stove creates a very fine exhaust smoke with very little, almost none, fly ash.
You can think of it like a cigarette that makes a fine ash that if you blow on it, the ash
just disappears into the air. This is totally amazing because the quantity of ash produced
in a whole month is less than a bucket full.
If you ever saw a coal stoker and had to haul coal ash then you would understand the major
advantage of pellets over coal and the ash you have to deal with.
The pellet stove has 3 motors in it. There is an auger screw motor that each time the auger is screwed , it dumps pellets to burn.
There is a convection blower motor that blows hot air into the living area.
There is an exhaust blower motor that sucks air out of the fire box and blows exhaust outside.
The exhaust blower creates a vacuuming affect on the fire box and thats something of a safety
design because imagine watching a log fireplace that had bellows blowing on the fire
and making it burn bright red hot and at the same time the bright hot fly ash was sucked
right up the chimney. In the design of the pellet stoves, this makes for a real hot fire
that totally consumes the pellets until they are just plain disintegrated....gone...
and no way any burning ash would force out of any air vent or door seal because there is
always this vacuum sucking ash and smoke out of the pellet stove.
Until you have a blackout.
If the blowers stop, you are screwed bigtime. No if, ands, or buts about it. screwed .
If the exhaust blower stops then you no longer have a hot fire being blown on and then
smoke sucked out.... you then have a cooler fire.. a smoking fire... and thick smoke
will fill your house. So plan accordly. Make sure that you have a window that can be opened
and maybe put a box fan in the window to pull the smoke out.
Its also a good idea to get an uninteruptable power supply like the ones used on computers
so if you have a black out, you won't get smoked out.
I must say that in my one winter time of pellet usage I never had a blackout that caused me
a big smoke problem. The exhaust pipe requirement for a pellet stove is much different than
standard wood stoves and coal stoves. The pellet stove does not produce creosote like standard
wood stoves and does not produce sulfuric acid like coal stokers so you can vent straight outside
with a 2 or 3 foot pipe and all you have to worry about is setting the pipe in a standoff
called a thimble and that comes shipped with the stove from stovesdirect.com
A 2 foot pipe will fit in a new home construction 2x4 wall but you will need a 3 foot pipe
for a brick wall. So plan accordingly.
As the pellet stove is a fire appliance you will want to place it on top of a fireproof
surface. You can buy a hearth or build a hearth. A hearth can be built using square garden
stepping stones or bathroom waterproof sheetrock. Bathroom sheetrock was invented so you
can cement tiles onto a bathroom wall or floor so this stuff if made of concrete and
you can trust it is totally fire proof. Whatever you use, remember, you are playing
with fire. Now speaking of playing with fire. We live in a time that is far removed
from open flame and the dangers that our ancestors respected. You never walk around
lighting hurricane lamps or fire places and you probably cook on a cooktop or electric
stove. If you cook on open gas flames then you treat that flame with respect.
If you put a pellet stove in your living room you must remember its real fire
and the metal parts of the stove DO GET HOT so if you have newspapers and kids and
pets and lose blankets and anything else to keep away from fire then be safe, not sorry.
The pellet stove base has no hot parts. There are no places on the base of my stove that
even feels like its hot compared to the top side of the pellet stove so you may be
thinking more about a perimeter cautionary area that keeps people from leaving things near
the stove and your local bulding code may require certain hearth layouts.
One last safety consideration would be fresh air. Do not put a pellet stove into
a sealed room or you will suffocate when the fire consumes all the oxygen and you turn blue.
Make sure you do have a fresh air intake pipe coming from outside or up
through the floor from a crawl space or basement if your room has no open
hallways to feed fresh air. If your house is real air tight , new construction
and mobile homes then you need a fresh air pipe.
Be careful about basement air. My air intake pipe connection was nothing more than a flange
on the back of the pellet stove and that means that this pipe connection would produce mold
and bugs if I connected it to my basement and left it there during the NON-heating seasons.
It was not a sealed connection from the back of the stove into the fire box. I consider that
to be a design flaw.
Thats all from me for now.