Wood Pellet Stove

Wood Pellet Stove

A wood pellet stove has a few advantages over traditional wood stoves:

Wood Pellet Stove
Wood Pellet Stove. Image courtesy of Essential Home and Garden

A wood pellet stove doesn’t need to be tended as often as a wood stove. Depending on the size of the stove’s hopper, the stove can run all day on a single load of pellets.

Wood pellet fuel burns cleaner than wood stoves.

Wood pellets are made from waste wood. They are an engineered heating fuel that can flow.  They also have a higher BTU output than a similar amount of cord wood.

Wood pellets are completely natural; there are no additives. The pellets are formed by compressing heated sawdust through a mill.  The natural lignans in the wood are the “glue” that makes the pellet hold its shape.

Heating with renewable wood pellet fuel incentives sustainable forestry and recreates the lost market for pulpwood, which was used for making paper (until we all started doing everything on our phones.)

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When considering a wood pellet stove, keep in mind:

Pellet stoves require an electric connection and have working parts that you won’t find in a cordwood wood stove, such as a motor, an auger, and ignition.

These working parts do make sound, which some people find disruptive. It’s good to try before you buy.

More moving parts means there’s more that can go wrong, so choose a good quality stove that will save you money in the long run.

Like any solid fuel appliance pellet stoves require ash clean out.  (Follow the manufacturer’s guidelines for clean-out routines.)

For a deep dive into pellet stoves, visit our nonprofit partner the Alliance for Green Heat

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.