Heat
Below is a photo of our wood pellet stove fireplace insert. It sits in our fireplace and will heat our home during the colder months. We have a natural gas furnace which we hope not to use at all, or rarely, reducing our dependancy on fossil fuels. Wood pellets are the same size and shape as rabbit food. They are the color of saw dust, and are made from compressed saw dust. There are no chemicals used to hold them together. They are dumped into the stove hopper through the lid that acts as the top of the stove. The hopper holds one 40 lb. bag of pellets. Wood pellets are made from scrap lumber and are a totally renewable resource.
Wood pellet stoves are incredibly efficient. 82% of the heat created is transferred into the house. Even the best wood burning stoves send 30% of the heat up the chimney. A conventional fireplace sends 80-90% of the heat created up the chimney and draws warm air already in your home up the chimney with it. Our stove also creates very low emissions. A typical wood burning stove produces 7 or 8 grams of emissions per hour. Our stove creates 0.9 grams of emissions per hour or less. It also creates no smoke and less than 0.5% of the pellet fuel becomes ash. This means we only need to empty the ash from the ash pans in the stove 2 or 3 times per year.
The pellets themselves are less expensive than buying wood. We bought one ton of pellets for $189. One ton of pellets equals roughly 1.5 cords of wood. That amount of wood in our area would cost about $330. Pellet fuel is less expensive than all other types of heating fuel except coal. Also one ton of pellets takes up only 4 cubic feet of space.
Here's the best part. The stove is totally automatic. We have it connected to a digital thermostat that we can set for different temperatures at different times of day on different days of the week. The stove feeds itself with pellets and lights itself automatically. It continues to feed itself with pellets with a corkscrew device called an auger until the desired temperature is reached. Then it burns out in about 10 minutes and shuts itself off. The blowers that circulate air internally and blow the heated air out into the house use the equivalent electricity of a 200w light bulb.
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