[AT] Pellet stove

[Indiana Robinson]

	I bought a new pellet stove last week. I didn't need it 
just yet but sales have been so brisk that I was afraid 
that when I needed it (next month) that I might not have 
much to pick from. I will install the new one in the house 
and put the one we have used for the last two years in the 
shop.
	I am going to install the new one at one end of the family 
room (24'x36'+) and put the last wood stove back in the 
stove nook. It is one of the cabinet type wood stoves with 
a thermostat and a blower on it.
	 I will also keep the big wood stove in the shop. It is 
big enough to call a furnace and has a large squirrel cage 
blower on it which blows a lot of air out and down from 
each side of it.
	The plan in both cases is to keep the wood stoves going 
while we are available all day long but then to let the 
pellet stoves take over when we are gone or at night. That 
way neither place will have an opportunity to cool down and 
have to be heated back up. Most days the pellet stoves will 
be shut down after the wood stoves are fired up. The wood 
fires will be banked down over night. The wood stoves 
should keep the pellet cost down well and I have the wood.  
Then in extreme cold weather using both should eliminate 
the need for the electric heat to kick on in the upper 
level of the house. The new pellet stove is also about 
1/3rd higher BTU rated than the old one.
	I was going to buy a corn stove but those are all gone and 
on waiting list here. Its not too big a deal as I have 
burned a pellet / corn blend successfully in the stove I 
had. At the moment I do not plan to grow any corn next year 
anyway.
	The new stove is a Breckwell like the ones at the bottom 
of this page:
http://www.breckwell.com/pellet.htm
	Mine is the "Big E" furnace but with the large glass door.
	One of the things I did not care for on the old one was 
that the hopper barely held 40 # of pellets. This one holds 
140#. Also at low fire the old one would use at least 3 to 
4 pounds of pellets an hour which in 40 degree weather will 
drive you out of the house and wastes a lot of fuel. The 
new stove claims to burn as little as .9 pounds an hour on 
the lowest setting.
	There is a "secret" set of buttons on the old stove to 
adjust the low feed rate but that manufacture calls then 
"factory set" and does not tell how to set them. I intend 
to get a free video that they now have that supposedly 
tells how to set them. I don't want that high of a feed 
rate in the shop. I am not sure why they were so secretive 
about those settings in the past.
	The new stove will be connected to a millivolt thermostat 
mounted at a remote location in the room which should also 
save some fuel. Sometimes the day starts cold but warms a 
lot before we get home.
	The old pellet stove was $800 and the new one was $1200.
	The shop still needs a bit of "closing in" but I am 
gaining ground on it and it will be fairly tight a a couple 
of weeks. I'm really looking forward to working in a warm 
shop all winter. It is hard to get excited about working in 
there at 20 degrees...   :-)   I feel pretty comfortable 
working at 50 to 55 degrees.


-- 
"farmer"
Living at Hewick Midwest

Sometimes we have to work at it a little but if we 
are all going to age well we must indeed work at keeping a 
positive attitude. We might as well go out in overdrive and 
with the pedal to the metal because this thing called life 
"don't got no reverse"...  There is no sense wasting 
a lot of time trying to find one... 
(FJR 2005)

Francis Robinson
Central Indiana USA
robinson at svs.net