Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
Posted on 07/05/2008 12:19:44 PM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
Nick Sylvester is a father of two small children who uses wood pellets to heat his home.
"I am a fan of the pellets, I don't have the time to stoke," Sylvester said. "I want a thermostat and be able to walk away. There is no overheating, or it shuts down."
Sylvester is also the product manager for Superior Hearth, Spas & Leisure with stores in Southington and Avon.
With home heating oil expected to reach $4.75 to $5 per gallon, homeowners are flocking to get a closer look at fireplace inserts, pellet and wood burning stoves to heat their homes. According to Sylvester and others, the savings can pay for the stove in a single season.
"We're really getting hammered," Sylvester said. "We saw the weather changing and the price of oil, and we allocated 50 percent more than what we sold last year."
Sylvester has had one customer who turned over his deposit on a spa tub to put down on a pellet stove.
"This is about needs versus wants," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at myrecordjournal.com ...
OM_! Hear the screams of Mother Earth as her children are cut down and burned!!!
What about the acid rain?
Self-Preservation and Tactical Advantage
A research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense awarded $5 million to a North Dakota research and development facility to create a surrogate for military-grade jet fuel, JP-8. In a span of just 18 months, researchers plan to deliver a domestically produced, renewable fuel that’s virtually indistinguishable from its petroleum-based counterpart.
By Ron Kotrba
Projections from the U.S. Department of Defense estimate fuel losses during combat—not what is actually used to fight—will amount to $86.8 million in 2008. In-theater fuel supplies suffer losses from extreme desert heat where tactical “bag-farm” storage sites aren’t equipped with vapor recovery systems. Vehicles of war hit by enemy fire and those suffering from mechanical breakdowns, which are subsequently destroyed, also contribute to the loss of fuel in battle. Not only is actual fuel lost, but it also costs millions to transport and store multiple grades of fuels that can be accessed for effective tactical operations, especially in politically unstable regions. “The cost is anywhere from $100 to $400 to get one gallon of fuel to the battlefield,” says Ted Aulich, research leader with the Grand Forks, N.D.-based Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC), the recent recipient of a $5 million contract from the defense department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The U.S. military is working on producing solutions to mitigate these and many other economic losses associated with fuel use in war.
“The military has this ‘single battlefield-fuel’ concept,” Aulich says. “They are trying to use a single fuel for aircraft, Humvees, tanks and everything in between.” While this may not sound economical—burning high-quality jet fuel in Humvees—what’s another dollar or two per gallon when the transportation costs are already so high? Furthermore, national security naturally comes into play. Domestic rhetoric pushing for the proliferation of renewable fuels frequently hinges on national security, which is ultimately about preserving a way of life and proactively avoiding interruption if foreign oil shipments should cease.
http://www.biomassmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=1155
It’s a shame that the price of wood pellet have gone up tremendously in the last couple of years as well.
poor liberals, its seems like only yesterday that they were wishing for higher gas prices like they pay in europe to drive down CO2 emissions
be careful what you wish for
I always wonder if at the turn of the century people thought cars would elimnate the worst pollution of the day,
horse manure.
Everybody should do this. Not enough wood might be a drawback and not enough water to put out burning hovels could be a problem.
They want us to live in em not cut em down. These people would prefer us to leave decisions like what to wear, what to eat, where to go and what to do up to a committee.
This is a “new idea”?
Wood stove fuel pellets do not require wood be cut down to make them. They are made out of sawdust from wood being cut for other purposes, that is what is rather ingenious about it - someone decided istead of having to truck the sawdust away and pay to do it, to turn it into a product that has almost no ash left to deal with, is safe and cheap and would otherwise be wasted.
It also makes excellent pet litter as it gives off no toxic fumes, and is extremely safe for people and animals, and cheap. And it actually combats urine odor.
I had a pellet stove for several years, when I lived in the far north. It was great! They take only a small fraction of the effort of burning cord wood (which I did for decades).
They can easily be retrofitted; because they don’t require a standard chimney (they install like a gas-burning heater — just a 6” hole in the wall behind the stove will do in most cases).
They’re also safer, because only a few ounces of pellets are in the fire pit at any time. If you shop around, you’ll find fire insurance costs a lot less for pellet stoves than for cord-wood burners.
If wood pellets are expensive or in short supply where you live; there are all sorts of alternative pellet fuels. Corn, switchgrass, peanut shells, etc. can be burned in pellet stoves (you have to get the right stove). Wood pellets are plentiful where I live, because of the pine beetle infestation. Still, price will always be based on what the market will bear.
Why stop at wood? We need to pellitize cow chips too.
There is not enough wood on the planet for everybody to do this.
How about not using oil and gas to generate electricity and use coal instead?
Oh, and bat guano pellets too.
I don’t advocate everyone do this. Where in my post did I say I think everyone in the world do this? Please read what I type, not what you think I’m saying.
I just think it’s cool that someone looked at the ‘waste’ everyone else looked at and saw the potential for a good product. It spawned a whole new type of stove industry to take advantage of it. Plus people are using it for things the inventor never even thought of (pet litter).
LOL
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
Wood burning stoves and wood pellet stoves are not the same thing. You can’t burn actual wood logs in a wood burning stove.
Do you know if these places make a distinction between ‘wood burning’ and ‘wood pellet’ stoves? I would think, being liberal, they would, because pellet stoves are burning a recycled waste product (compressed sawdust) as opposed to the ‘lumber’.
I meant to say you can’t burn wood in a wood pellet stove...
Burned wood for 15 years, then they put the natural gas lines in. Switched to natural gas and it was cheap and convenient. I’m happy I left the old wood burner alone though. I’ve got two cords split and stacked and it’s barely July. By October I plan to have enough to get me through the winter.
Uh-huh. That sounded good a few years ago during the housing boom when lots of houses were being built. Now that no houses are being built anymore, there is less logging and milling being done, and sawdust is becoming hard to come by.
I have horses, and they are bedded in sawdust or wood shavings, so I know that the cost of wood byproducts is becoming scandalous. Now the stuff is getting not just expensive but actually hard to obtain. Last winter, neighbors who had installed pellet stoves couldn't find pellets when they needed them.
Personally I like to burn plain wood. It's more annoying in a lot of ways, but I can control my own supply: there are lot of trees around.
I didn’t realize the stove pellets were becoming harder to find. I need to pick some up then. Last time I got a bunch I got 40 pound bags for $3.50 a bag.
Gotta tell you, it sure beats any other pet litter prices. If you’ve bought a bag lately, what are they going for around where you are?
Would you consider bedding them on hay? I know my friends who used to have horses on their ranch, that’s what they used. I remember, when I visited I had the fun of cleaning out the old and putting in the new.
There is less lumber being cut so less side products. Look for pellets to skyrocket in the next year.
If you like $5/gal, Thank Congress. If you want $10, Vote Obama.
PRay for W and Our Troops
Up here pellets are running $210.00 to about $270.00 per ton depending on who you buy from. At $240.00 per ton, and assuming equally efficient appliances, #2 heating oil is 2.5 times more expensive per million btus.
“There is less lumber being cut so less side products. Look for pellets to skyrocket in the next year.”
There’s still plenty of product available for pellets and the price will drop because its so easy and cheap to get into the pellet making business.
what about sewerage
More suited for the industrial sites, like coal burning facilities, imo.
I think your friend probably used straw to bed his horses, not hay. Horses eat hay, and it’s not good for them to eat hay that’s been soiled with urine and feces.
Straw can be used for bedding, and it’s traditional in England and some other places where there aren’t a lot of trees to be cut down. People use it here when they want to sell their horses’ manure to mushroom farmers. But it’s not as absorbant as wood shavings, and the result is that there can be pools of urine in the stall and accompanying smell and flies. A stable should smell clean and good. Straw is also a yucky nuisance when you’re mucking out, as you learned. Sawdust is a much more pleasant substance to work with.
We have cut down the amount of bedding necessary by using thick rubber mats on the bottoms of the stalls, so what we’re looking for is some absorptive material that will soak up any puddles.
The bottom line is, if you’re going to install a stove it might be wise to find out if pellets are going to be easily and cheaply available in your area. No doubt that varies from one area to the next.
Electric heat is more than 3 times cheaper than heating oil. This coming winter will be a real problem for people still stuck with Home heating oil.
Because of the labor involved, for me, electric is the way to go. It will always be cheaper because the power in my area comes from Hydro electric and a Nuclear plant.
Electricity is the energy of the future. Of course I am talking about newer hydronics and in floor water heating systems. They are 100% efficient. Zero heat/energy loss.
My brother in the mountains of NY is pulling his wood furnace in favor of one that burns coal, and he is relegating his oil furnace to being a backup. What goes around, comes around...
I actually use my wood pellets for pet litter.
I guess I also meant to say ‘straw’. Straw is just hay that’s been yellowed out by being in the sun. At least that’s what I seen happen to the old hay I’ve used to cover certain spots on the lawn - in a few days it’s all yellow and turned to straw.
“There is not enough wood on the planet for everybody to do this.”
The wood we grow now won’t be available for 10 years or more, too late to affect the price today......
We can’t plant our way out of this......
The answer is conservation, not more unsustainable wood-burning.....
They make absolutely no distinction betweeen wood stoves, pellet stoves, or even those little pre-made logs you can burn.
‘No burn days’ mean no burning....period.
I believe the fine starts at $1k and they pay people to drive around town with heat sensing guns pointed at chimneys. They will leave a ticket on your front door even if you don’t answer. We have daily announcements to ‘turn in your neighbors for burning on no burn days’.
We took a wood stove out of our house winter before last because it was old and not EPA compliant. The rules state that you can’t sell your house with it in there unless it is disabled. The only way to disable it is to fill it with cement (not kidding). So we took out a perfectly working stove and gave it away to someone who lives in the surrounding mountains and don’t have to abide by their nazi rules. Now we have an old style fireplace that eats much more wood and bellows out smoke. But they are the smart ones right?
http://www.valleyair.org/aqinfo/WoodBurnPage.htm
Wood pellets as jet fighter fuel?
“It will always be cheaper because the power in my area comes from Hydro electric and a Nuclear plant.
Electricity is the energy of the future. Of course I am talking about newer hydronics and in floor water heating systems. They are 100% efficient. Zero heat/energy loss.”
Depending on the cost per kilowatt hour, you may well be right. Where I’m from, most of the power is hydro but because of the power grid we where jammed into, our cost per kilowatt hour is about $0.11 and so electric heat is still about 2X the cost of pellet heat. If we can get out of this damn ISO, that may well change with virtually all of our power then coming from hydro, biomass and nuclear. In the meantime, wood and pellets seem the best options around here.
Have you looked into “Off-Peak” rates? Some are mandated for people who use electric as a primary heating source.
I drew a contract at 5 cents per KWH and they can only shut me down for no more than 4 hours per day. With the 36 hour heat sink I have built into the system, I don’t notice it one bit, even in -30 F. I use an extremely efficient 10 stage boiler (20KW) and it is about the size of a microwave oven. The rooms are all zoned out and I can control it to a very tight degree.
My system can also be supported by a wood boiler if I like and it is plumbed to do just that. But the work of burning trees off my land is not yet worth it.
Up here in Alaska I saw on Craigslist an old high voltage finned transformer that was turned into a wood stove. It was pretty big about 3 foot tall and the cooling fins helped it to radiate heat, an interesting idea but would be Satans witchcraft if done in Kalifornia.
In Spokane WA, wood burning stoves and fire places have been banned. Only pellet stoves are allowed if they do not smoke in any way. Any smoke seen coming from chimneys has a violator hot line to call. Of course they are every bit as Liberal as Portland and Seattle and Environmental crimes are soon to get the death penalty in these crap holes.
I’ve heated with both pellets and wood.
We started with the pellet stove, because it seemed less troublesome, and cleaner. It was tough to store a ton or two of pellets, and, to get any heat out of it, the internal electric fan must be running. It probably consumes 100 watts or more.
It was 40,000 btu, and the house was never warm.
We added a good quality wood stove insert upstairs, and even with the extra work of starting, and stoking, found the rich warmth worth it.
The basement was still cold. :-(
Replaced the pellet stove with a cheap wood stove in the basement, which offered great heat, but no staying power.
When it went out at 2 am, there was no residual heat.
By 6 am, we were freezing.
Replaced the cheap wood stove with a good quality cast iron one, and now we heat for less than 2k a year.
It is a LOT of work, and not for everybody, but I hear of people here in Ontario paying $800 a month for heat, and we have to heat at least 5-7 months a year.
Dec.- March temperatures are almost always below zero, and often -10 to -20. Sometimes, -40.
LOL!
Not exactly. Hay is any type of mowed grass such as alfalfa, timothy, clover, etc. Straw is what’s left after grains, such as wheat or oats, have been harvested. It’s coarser.
I did the same thing. I put in a natural gas insert in the fireplace when it was cheap. I too have a couple of cords of wood cut, stacked and dry for this winter. I can cut a bunch more wood.
Another clueless statement from Rightminnow.
My inlaws have heated with wood for years in a very cold upper Midwest state. People are happy to give them storm felled trees — supply has never been a problem. Their boiler sits 50 yeards from the house and the hot water flows underground.
Do you ever get out of your urban apartment???
Why would anybody believe anything you say after this navel informed statement?
We need to pellitize cow chips too.
And liberals...
but I repeat myself
Thanks for the insight. We’ll think of you when it’s 50 below this winter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.