[stefanbatory]

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

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

It sounds like your parents have a good thing going there. I'd probably do the same thing in their situation. In fact, I did — I burned cord wood, (and construction waste) for a couple of decades.

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.