lotta pellets are made from saw-dust... it won't be missed
Posted on 06/22/2008 7:15:57 PM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
arty Farnum can't keep pellet stoves in his Northern Lights Hearth Sports store on Wilton Road in Farmington.
Nor can Mack Curtis, who owns Wayne's Stove & Canoe Shop in Madison. Ditto for The Stove Barn on China Road in Winslow, owned by Wade Bullard.
Heating-oil prices that could flirt with $5 a gallon this winter have more people ready to switch away from oil. For an investment of roughly $3,000 plus the cost of pellets, a pellet stove might pay for itself in a year or two, shop owners say.
Mainers appear to be believers, and they're scooping up the burners as well as stocking up on pellets, in some cases buying a truckload of pellets at a time, Curtis said.
"We're pretty much sold out of what we have," Farnum said. "I've got 150 on order."
Northern Lights has sold more than 100 pellet stoves this year.
"There's no need to panic," Farnum said of the rush to such stoves. "But if I'm interested in a stove, I would get into a shop and put my name in, and maybe even put a deposit down."
Farnum said that the cost of pellets is increasing slightly, due to transportation costs. He has been selling them for $285 a ton, but expects that price to increase.
Northern Lights sells one-ton pallets in 40-pound bags and 22-pound bags.
(Excerpt) Read more at morningsentinel.mainetoday.com ...
Its 115 here in Tucson. Do those things cool too?
Hope they can afford the carbon footprint tax, coming soon to a northern town near you.
I’m probably going to get one myself, but has anyone calculated the ecological impact if everyone requiring winter heat tried to switch to wood-burning?
I don’t think it’s the final answer.
If you have a little money to burn and some land, you can even “roll your own” pellets from hay, stover, etc.
It doesn’t need to replace every oil fuel heater, it can create a sustainable market on waste wood, and still reduce oil consumption
New stoves burn very clean. I’ve been heating with wood for years. I bought a new stove a couple of years ago, when warmed up, it makes no visable smoke.
If you can reccomend a supplier for a reasonably priced pellet mill,let me know.The used ones that I’ve looked at were 15k to 60k.
lotta pellets are made from saw-dust... it won't be missed
Pellet stoves are “carbon neutral” (for anyone who cares) & environmentally sound. They don't smoke like a cord wood stove & they consume waste wood.
You can also get pellet stoves that burn corn, or switch-grass pellets, etc. The corn burners are particularly good, as there's a lot of heat content and little ash in corn.
They sure do when the power goes out in the winter and the little blowers and feed augers quit working !.......:o)
I have had a wood stove , small one with a glass faced door in my home everywhere I was stationed (even there off speedway at DM) as a backup for HVAC or too augment the HVAC.
We keep about 6 face cords of hickory stored and ready these days .
One of the stoves that gets used alot around here are the ones that burn dry feed corn. Same principal as the pellet stoves yet they are ......corny !
my parents’ wood furnace consumes waste wood without the need to peeltize it...
dad gets his wood from in the dumpster at work, from cleaning out line fences in farm fields, from my brother’s various activities...he even burned up the remains of our old home that was lost in a fire in the furnace
and no, the fire was not caused by the wood furnace - it was an electrical fire
You're kidding, right? Ain't enuff wood to go around, Hoss. Relax.
The plain old woodburners are better.
The problem for these stoves is that users must depend on fuel being manufactured and it mainly comes from sawdust, a material that the Wall Street Journal recently reported was in high demand because it is used for so many applications such as particle board.
If I had one of these stoves, I would make sure that I had next years supply of pellets secured as early in year as possible, IOW, before summer.
Sawdust is also in low supply due to the mill closures caused by the housing market downturn.
~ post of the day ~
I looked into getting a pellet stove for my wood-shop when I lived up North (1995). At that time pellets made from peanut shells were available.
It seems to me you could pelletize everyday trash. I bet there is a LOT of energy in the wax coated paper cups and containers that most fast food places use.
I only switched to a pellet stove when I moved into town (where there were “no-burn” days for ordinary wood stoves, whenever there was a thermal inversion). The pellet stove was a lot less work for me & it was easier to retrofit than a cord-wood burner would have been (no new chimney required). Pellet stoves burn so clean that there's no problem using them in urban areas — even those that have “no-burn” days to eliminate smog.
When I was using the pellet stove, most of the supply came from sawdust & other mill waste. This stuff used to be burned off in “bee-hive burners” — but, burning of mill waste was outlawed in the name of air quality. Pellets were a way of turning waste into a useful product.
BTW, the pellets I burned were cheaper than fuel oil — even when oil was only $30/bbl.
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