Wood Stove?

[Wildsky]

Its SO cold, I have to get something to warm up the house.

A friend just put in a wood stove in their living room and said it was pretty easy.

What is your experience?

Whats the deal with pellet stoves? Can they burn wood and pellets ?

 

[adoptedbyachicken]

Oh we loved our pellet stoves at the coast, it was the wet damp cold there, just below freezing with inches of slush that chills you to the bone even inside. They are a fantastic source of very dry heat with powerful fans in them generally. Highly recommend them, but you do have to buy pellets. They are as fully automatic as your furnace, light themselves and run on a thermostat. They are as clean burning and envio friendly as a natural gas fireplace or furnace. They install easy as a fireplace insert, or you have to install a chimney if your going free standing. They do not impact insurance rates here due to their safety. Load them up with a week of pellets and your done, or the small ones can hold at least a days worth. Clean to bring the wood in, just pour from a bag, no dirt or spiders.

Wood stoves have the advantage of just going and getting your own wood, which is a lot of work, but may be free to you. After that they are all disadvantage, they are harder to install and many companies will now not insure you as they have huge fire risk if you overload them one day. They can self dampen to adjust output but none self light or load. Bringing the wood in we always had spiders and dirt and bits we had to clean up after.

 

[highmountainchick]

Actually we have both, we have a pellet in one area and a wood stove in the main area. Right now we heat our entire house with the wood stove. I preferr the wood stove over the pellet. You will be able to obtain higher BTU's with a wood burner than pellet, and that's what we need right now. I guess it depends on what your situation is, do you need to heat your whole house or do you want something to take the chill off. We use the pellet in the late spring or if we have a chilly summer night. Bags of pellets run $4-5 dollars each and you much have electricity to run your stove. Wood stoves create more mess but we've never had bugs in our house from the wood. And our insurance wasn't effect by the installation of the wood stove. We put in a very clean burning wood stove to replace our propane system.

 

[Wildsky]

Thank you guys - good info.

I want to have something we can use if the power goes out - right now we have nothing to fall back on.

I would also like something cheaper than using our electricity to heat.

Our house is pretty big I think, a little over 2000sf. But for the most part I just want to heat up the living room and kitchen area, thats where we spend ALL our waking time. I've even picked out a spot that would work really well - if we could vent it out the wall (we have a three story home - inc. the basement. I don't want to go up through the second story to vent through the roof)

I'd love to just load a pellet stove and let it take over. But if they need electricity that wouldn't suit us 100%

We'd probably have to buy wood for a wood stove, we have tree's and such but we're not going to cut any down, we do have some wood out back, from a long time ago tree's falling etc.

 

[Black Feather]

I've never used a pellet stove so I can't comment on the differences between them and wood stoves, I do however have a wood stove and think it's great. When the power goes out I can heat my place AND cook on it

So, while my neighbours don't have heat or a stove, I'm making pancakes for breakfast.

They do require upkeep such as cleaning the stovepipe once or twice a year, and making sure everything is as it should be, but other than that the stove itself is not difficult to keep. In my area you can buy cords of wood delivered so you don't have to chop yourself, but my family usually chops our own wood and then rents a splitter to split it up. Just did that last weekend actually. We split a little over two cord of wood and that will keep me for a few winters as a supplemental heat source to electricity. My stove is not big enough to use as a full time heat source.

Cheers,
Urban Coyote

 

[Katy]

I don't know anything about the pellet stoves, but we've heated our 2 story farmhouse with a wood stove for over 30 years. Heating with wood is cheaper than heating with propane or electricity as long as you have a place to cut firewood for free or very cheaply. If you have to go buy all the wood you burn through in a winter (and it's more than you can imagine!!) I doubt it would come out much cheaper in the long run.

 

[sara]

When we bought our home 3 years ago, it had no central heat which was very exciting to my DH because he always wanted to heat with a wood/coal stove. So he put radiators and a stove in. We heat our entire house for about 500.00 a year, for coal. We try to burn wood as much as possible since it's for free

 

[ChickaD]

We've been heating our big old two-story farmhouse for several years with just a woodstove at the base of our stairs, even though we have the added option of using a big oil/wood furnace in the basement, which does require electricity to run the fan (to distribute the heat). We like a form of heat that doesn't rely on electricity, since it goes out fairly often around here. That's my main concern about pellet stoves: their dependence on electricity. In our area, it's still lots cheaper to heat with firewood (even if it's been cut and split by someone else) than to pay for oil, propane, or electric heat.

 

[redoak]

We put in our wood stove in the fall of 2004 after we bought our house. We went to a woodstove store and they set us up with all the pipe and fittings we needed. The next day we cut a hole in our sheetrock ceiling and a hole in our roof. Installed a couple collars and the correct pipes and a little tar and done. It took the both of us about 4 hours total.

 

[ole-crone]

I've heard that some pellet stoves still run with the electricity off.

My personal opinion is about the older ones that don't. I had a friend who spent a very long, cold winter's night physically putting a tablespoon or two of pellets into the stove when the elec. went off. He said that the hopper needed elec. to work. He had to add them every 10-15 minutes but it was either that, or his kids had no heat. He removed the pellet stove and replaced it with a woodstove.