Could Heating With Wood Pellets be Right For You?
For those of you who love wood heat but don’t want to put up with the disadvantages associated with burning firewood, burning wood pellet stove may be a solution for you. Instead of burning traditional firewood logs a pellet stove burns small wood pellets. These pellets are made by compressing small pieces of wood or sawdust into cylindrical pellets.
Advantages of Heating with a Pellet Stove
One of the biggest advantages of heating your home with a pellet stove is convenience. Once you dump the pellets into the stove’s hopper you don’t have to continually feed it the way you would with a traditional wood stove. The pellet stove automatically feeds the pellets into the burning chamber at just the right rate to produce the amount of heat that you want. This means no getting up in the nigh to put wood on the fire and no coming home to a cold house.
Pellet stoves are more efficient than traditional wood heat. The combustion is much more controlled in a smaller combustion chamber with the right amount of air for more complete combustion. This results in more heat and fewer emissions. Pellet burning stoves are some of the cleanest heating appliances available.
Pellet stoves are easier to keep clean. They produce very little ash, and don’t have the problems with the creosote buildup that a traditional wood stove has. Pellets typically come in plastic bags to seal out moisture and they are not messy like firewood can be. Pellets are highly compressed and more dense and therefore take up less space to store than natural wood.
Disadvantages of Pellet Burning Stoves
The main disadvantage of using pellets to heat your home is they rely on electricity to operate some of the components. The amount of electricity they use is minimal but this can become a problem where an electrical supply is not available or in a power outage. But there are backup systems are available such as generators or battery systems.
Another disadvantage is producing wood pellets is a more sophisticated process than producing firewood. It’s not as easy and requires more expensive equipment than traditional firewood that can be produced with a chainsaw and a supply of trees or logs. There have been problems in the past with wood pellet shortages in some areas. But as more pellet mills are going into production supplies can become more stable.