Don't read this post before operating machinery...

Since this post is about everything you never wanted to know about heating your home with a pellet stove, I suggest you read this just before going to bed, as it may help you to get to sleep.

Well today is going to be pellet stove cleaning day. In some of my previous posts I've mentioned that I heat my home with a pellet stove and though this does save me money, it also comes with a price to be paid. Regular cleaning of the stove is necessary in order to keep it running well,and depending on how well it's running, determines how often you have to clean it, kind of a "pellet stove paradox" (making a mundane thing sound important).

Pellet stoves run on pellets made of compressed sawdust. This sawdust is a byproduct of the wood industry, and there was a time before pellet stoves, when they would have to dispose of the sawdust, but now it can be used to heat your home. Being that I am a tree hugger, and not a big fan of the wood industry, you might think this odd that I would heat my home in such a manor, but I figure if you are going to cut down the tree anyways, you might as well use all of it.

These pellets look like nothing more than rabbit food. They come on a skid of fifty, forty-pound bags (one ton) and do require a little work moving the bags around depending on the set-up you have. The skids of pellets come with a giant black "garbage bag" over them and are then wrapped in plastic wrap to keep them dry. As long as the bag and plastic wrap are intact, they can sit outside in the elements and not get wet. After I remove the wrapping on a skid, I move the bags up onto my covered porch to keep them dry. If the pellets get wet they will expand and be ruined. It's not as bad as it sounds, moving a ton of pellets, I can do it in about twenty minutes, which is the other job I have to do today.

The place where I buy them delivers them with a large flatbed truck that has a forklift hooked on the back. This forklift is lowered to the ground and the driver will put the skids of pellets anywhere you want them. It's an unusual forklift in that it is three wheeled and the wheels are more like big "mudder" tires with tractor tire treads, this allows the forklift to drive through just about anything, so they can even be delivered in the winter and not tear up your lawn too much.

My pellet stove has a large hopper in the back that will hold about three bags of pellets. It feeds the pellets down into a burn-pot where the pellets are ignited and burned. The burnt ash is then blown out of the burn-pot by the air coming in through the air intake pipe that comes in through the back of the stove and hooks into the burn-pot holder. The burn-pot has little holes in it that allow the air to blow through, expelling the burned ash, which then falls down into a removable ash pan. This ash pan has a gap around it where the soot and smoke are sucked through and the exhaust then flows through a damper, past an exhaust fan, and vents out through a pipe that goes out through my exterior wall (yawning yet?)

The stove is about seven years old and doesn't run as well as it used to. I had to replace the seals around the door and the exhaust fan this year. These stoves are much more finicky than wood burning stoves in that there cannot be any air leaks around any of the openings in the stove. If there is, the stove will suck in air through the leaks and not through the intake pipe, which will stop the ash from blowing out of the burn-pot, and the pellets will start backing up out of the pot and the whole thing just stops burning correctly. Also if there is an air leak around the exhaust blower, the soot will "stay" in the stove, turning everything black and clogging up the exhaust.

I have to clean out the ash anywhere from three days, if it's not burning right, to a month, if it is burning well, but I haven't had it last a month since it was new. Right now it has been burning for about two weeks, the ash pan is full and the ash is filling up the bottom of the burn chamber and creeping up the side of the burn-pot holder. I have had it fill up with ash to the point where it's right up to the edge of the burn-pot, but I don't like to let it go that long (eyes getting heavy yet?)

I found out last year that the stove I was sold is defective. While talking to the owner of the store where I bought it (he has the same stove in his home) that there were supposed to be "tracks" in the bottom of the stove that the ash pan slides into, but my stove was apparently built without them. These tracks hold the ash pan up off of the bottom plate allowing the soot to vent out around the pan. The only reason my stove ran at all, was there is a weld seam near the ash pan and there is some weld slag (drops of weld) on the bottom plate that the pan sits on, holding it up just enough to let the soot out. Over time these weld droplets have worn off so the ash pan is sitting directly on the plate and there is no gap for the soot to get out. The company I bought the stove from wouldn't do anything about it since the stove is so old and out of warranty, so I fixed it by jamming two washers under the pan to hold it up and allow the exhaust to vent out.

Cleaning involves shutting the stove down and sucking all the ash and soot out of the stove with a shop-vac and also cleaning out the exhaust pipe with a brush on a long pole (just like a chimney sweep, but it's only 4 feet long). There is also some hard carbon build up on the burn-pot that I have to bust off with a hammer and chisel because this build up starts to close off the holes in the burn pot that allows the air in. This can be a very messy job but it isn't as bad as cleaning a wood burning stove, or so I'm told. It takes about two hours to clean everything after you let the stove cool down for an hour.

With the extra work involved and the mess, pellet stoves aren't for everyone. I don't mind the work involved with one of these, and they certainly aren't as convenient as heating with gas. I burn about 5 tons during the worst winters and less if it's not as cold. I had 1 ton left over from last year and bought 4 more tons for this year at $230 a ton (you can get them cheaper if you buy in the spring), with delivery it cost me $1018 (you can also save money if you have a truck and go get them yourself). I know heating this house with gas would cost a lot more, as I have had months like January when the gas bill ran upwards of $400 by itself. The price of pellets has gone up a lot since I bought the stove. When the price of natural gas went up, a lot of people put in pellet stoves, creating a shortage of pellets and driving the price up. I like knowing that my heating bills for the winter are already paid in advance and there are no big surprise gas bills to deal with.

One of the big drawbacks with heating this way is that the heat is not even throughout the house, with it being very hot in the room with the stove, and cooler in the rooms that are farther away from the stove. I do love being able to sit in front of the fire on those cold winter mornings, drinking my coffee, and it's great to stand in front of the stove and warm up after you come in out of the cold. I have a rocking chair in front of the stove, and the heat, and the "hum" that the stove makes, can put you to sleep very quickly, just like this post has done for you....