Currently i have a propane fueled furnace. A buddy of mine suggested installing a wood pellet stove to supplement my propane heat and to use less propane in winter.  

I use a big Lopi pellet stove  to heat our entire 2400 square foot home during the winter(Oklahoma)....takes between 2 and 3 pallets of pellets per winter..50 40# bags per pallet....

I've had to replace the burn-box and discharge blower gasket in nine years use...I have no idea how old the Lopi stove is??...Was in the house when I bought it...

Oh   and all brands of pellets are not created equal....better pellet fuel costs a bit more per bag...however burns longer and leaves less ash than the cheaper pellets

As far as electrical...the Lopi plugs into the wall 120v....power goes out you just fire-up the generator and plug in...

I know my parents got one because it was loads cheaper than the heating oil they had been using. They can keep the house warmer for less.

This.

Yep, nailed it.

Wood stove>kerosene heater>fire place>pellet stove.

How much is your Propane? The place I work for is selling for around $1.50/gallon now.

We have had the Englander stove that Lowes sells for about 8 years now, with hardly any issues to note.

In my experience they suck and suck big time. They burn way more pellets than advertised and they do not put out anywhere near the BTU's.
I bought one and it could not heat the hunting cabin despite having conveyed the sq footage and build to the retailer. I sold it for a big loss.
Oh and I broke the leaf springs in my truck hauling the pellets.

We installed one last year. This is our second year heating with it. We too wanted to off-set the cost of heating with propane. So far it's been awesome.

As stated, it sucks having to rely on electricity and pellets. Last spring it got cold after we ran out of our supply of pellets and none of the local places had anymore in stock, so we were SOL. So this year I bought 5 tons at $229/ton...these are good hardwood pellets. But it also beats having to cut, split, stack. store, and haul wood. Not to mention it's pretty clean versus wood furnaces/stoves.

Our house is about 2300 sqf and the stove sits out in a non-central room, so we have two of the little doorway fans to help circulate the warm air. On colder days the stove will pretty much run nonstop to keep the house right around 68-70. On the coldest winter days we'll bump up the furnace thermostat to help with heating.

Harman XXV Pellet Stove

Doorway Fan for Circulating Warm Air

I am paying about 1.68 per gallon. This is my first year with propane. Remember last year was $ 6 gallon.lol

 

Hahahahaha.....yeah, that's what I want to waste my limited fuel supplies on.........a pellet stove.

I think pellets stoves are great suburban appliances where burning wood is either not legal or not possible or if you are not healthy enough to go harvest your own wood, .

But for SHTF and those healthy enough to harvest your wood or at least stack delivered wood, a solid wood stove is the only way to go.

I was going to set my furnace fan to on instead of auto to help circulate the warm air from the stove. It will also be placed in front of the stairs so some heat will naturally move upstairs.

 

They are pretty handy and put out some cheap heat.

They do require electricity though, so that can suck if the power goes out.

Well sure, if your wood is free then it's a given. I'll take coal over wood as far as convience and heat output go, still way cheaper than most furnaces and our house stays almost 80 all winter.

Pellet stoves are great for people who want that kind of heat without the hassle. Just open up a bag and dump it in the hopper, clean out the ash as needed, no chimneys to clean or wood to split and stack, and you still get that stove like advantage of having a steady heat source.

I don't have many trees i can cut down, and i don't have a chainsaw yet.

Fixed.

A fireplace doesn't make jack shit for heat, and K1 heaters suck up a ton of fuel compared to a pellet stove.

I switched from a coal stove to a pellet stove 6-8 years ago as my main heat source. I also have NG as a supplement / backup. Pellets are about as easy as it gets. Buy pellets, stack bags, open bag and fill hopper, dump ashes every few days. No real mess and no real fuss. I don't want to mess with cutting, splitting and stacking wood anymore. Buy a quality stove like a Harman, quadra fire or kozi.

You have to buy pallets of pellets. You have to clean it properly regularly or it'll get all clogged up. You also have to reload the pellets when they get low, and make sure it's feeding correctly from time to time. To me, I'd rather set the temperature on the thermostat and forget about it, the pellet stoves are merely old technology with a semi modern spin. You'll spend more time on the heater than with modern heaters.

The only advantage would be for preppers that are awaiting the SHTF.

Cut my heating oil use by 3/4 with one. Run it 24-7 in the winter and burn 5 tons of pellets a year. You need a quality stove and quality pellets,neither of which are usually found in the big box stores.

Somewhat true from a negative aspect...My Lopi stove has a wall thermostat..you just set the temp..and it does it's thing until it runs out of pellets. Depending on how cold it is outside..you will burn anywhere from two + bags per day for really cold days to a bag of pellets every two or three days for warmer days...

Cleaning the stove(at least the big Lopi unit) consists of raking all the ashes into the built-in 'drawer every few days and cleaning the burn tray every few days. When the ash-pan gets full has to be dumped out. Maintenance is fairly minimal.  

the harman pc45 is able to burn corn or wheat which is not suitable for food or feed, does anyone have any experience with this? are there other pellet stoves that burn other materials beside wood pellets?

Hard to fault this logic. New England is without power. My sis in Portland, ME thought her pellet stove the best ever until now shes struggling to use inefficient fireplace.

My buddy has one in his new place and when he was showing it to me I realized it needs electricity to run the pellet hopper.
Meh

Ya also have to store the pellets properly.  Let them get wet and they swell, dissolve, and turn to crap.

I burn a lot of wood.  Even if you're not into running around with a chainsaw getting your own, there's no lack of guys selling split (and sometimes stacked) cordwood.

I think you're too far from the PA anthracite fields to have coal make much sense.  I hear they have automatic feeder stoves that run on rice coal just the same as pellet stoves though.  More BTUs per bag and less storage concerns, but again distance might make the price silly.

My log stoves have air jackets with electric blowers that kick heat out into the house.  You can use 'em without the blowers but the difference between heating with and without is pretty extreme.  In outages I run them off one of those two stroke HF generators that are on sale today under $90.  It's dirty power though and the pellet stoves often have an electronic controller that I wouldn't trust on shit power.  My two electric motors don't care.

Love mine......two tons of pellets per winter, keeps the house nice and warm

Yes, and Harmann makes one that has a return fitting so it can pipe hot air into your air handler.

Pellets are good if you need something to supplant your oil bills. Around me a "good" price for oil was 3.75-4.00 but you could catch it for $3.50's if you timed it right before the recent oil bust. HOWEVER the price-per-btu on pellets is about 30-40% of oil, so mu house stays at a toasty 70 degrees all winter long for <$1000 in pellets vs spending on average $3000+ for winter oil holding at 60-65 degrees. When oil climbs to over $4 a gallon like it has every bag of pellets sames me several dollars in fuel cost.


Yes it does use electricity, but you can run the stove off a small generator.

I like ours , its a big 'box store" model, us stove 55oo, holds 120 lbs of pellets. Our house is 4 years old and well insulated, the stove is in the finished basement (1700 sq ft) it will heat it up like a sauna, heat goes right up the stairwell and we have a box fan that blows the warm air through out the open/vaulted upstairs, all ceiling fans upstairs are on low , It will keep the upstairs at 68 degrees during the dead of winter and the downstairs at 75-80 without issue. So in short , the $900 pellet stove thats only rated at 2200 sq ft will heat 3400 sq ft to my standards and I burn 3 tons of pellets a season. My house has a damn heatpump system which is great when its 40 outside but is worthless with its back up electric heat coils when real cold.  I work a 48 hr shift at EMS so its very user friendly for wife and I , i fill before I leave and she keeps it topped off, clean it out every 3-4 days. I have a whole house generator so power outages dont worry me, that being said I will install a traditional wood burner upstairs next year as an option for extended power outages and because I miss cutting firewood. My folks heated their house my whole childhood with two wood burners, many happy thoughts of days spent in the woods with my dad and brothers cutting and hauling wood, I'd like to do the same with my 4 kiddos.

And they are more expensive than wood to operate, even with buying wood by the chord and having it delivered.

Actually a fireplace puts out a lot of heat. You just have to get a modern efficient one. Like the quadra-fire 7100 can heat up to 3600sq. ft. Newer fireplace draw the air for combustion from outside, instead of inside the home.

I have one in the kitchen for supplemental heat.  I like it, but it does not save any significant amount of money vs heating oil IMO.



It has taken me 3 or 4 years to settle one the particular pellet I use now.  It is not cheap, but it burns hotter and cleaner with less ash than any other one I have tried.



I have run my stove for ~2.5 hours off a booster pack when the power was out.  (I unplugged the start coil and lit in manually)  I have also ran it off a simple inverter and a car.



They have their purpose, but cost savings is not really their strong point.

AssumptionsUnitsHeat Value««
BTUs/unit
Kerosene (no. 1 fuel oil)gallons135,000
Burner fuel (no. 2 oil)gallons138,500
ElectricityKwh3,413
Natural gastherm100,000
Propanegallons92,500
Anthracite coaltons26,000,000
Hardwood (20% moisture) airtightcord24,000,000
Hardwood (20% moisture) catalytic convertercord24,000,000
Pine (20% moisture) airtight stovecord15,000,000
Pine (20% moisture) catalytic convertercord15,000,000
Wood pellets in a pellet stovetons16,000,000
Corn fuel««« (15% moisture)tons17,000,000

http://umaine.edu/publications/7216e/


$ per Mbtus with LP at 1.68/gal is $18.16.
$ per Mbtus with pellets at 220/ton $13.75

You could save about 4 bucks per million btus. Is that savings enough to justify spending thousands on a new heating system? That money may be better spent on insulation and weatherproofing to make your house easier to heat.

rambling story...

A couple of years ago we were going back and forth on a wood stove vs a pellet stove. Four things moved us in the direction of a pellet stove: 1.) We have low ceilings in the downstairs and we'd get chased out of the living room from the heat before the rest of the downstairs warmed up, 2.) if we put the wood stove in the exterior corner we'd have a 36' tall chimney that would look like a rocket standing next to the house - and bracing the top 20' would have been a bugger, 3.) if we moved the wood stove to an interior wall we'd have to redesign the bathroom to avoid having the pipe go up through the middle of the sink counter and 4.) when I'm 70 I don't want to be cutting, splitting, stacking, moving wood.

So, we bought a Quadrafire Mt. Vernon... it was a noisy PITA -  AC motors were loud, wires not routed cleanly and got caught on the ash pan all the time, the #2 snap disk blew all the time, always in the middle of the night.  Also, the original model used bolts to hold the side and rear plates in place.  Due to the extreme heating/ cool down the nuts became  VERY difficult to remove, they stripped out every time I tried to take them out.  I would up cutting the nuts off.  It must have been a known problem because they'd replace them for free every year.

Two years ago we replaced the original model with a Mt. Vernon AE (alternate energy) and love it.  

The redesigned Mt. Vernon AE  uses DC motors so it is much quieter, the wires are routed so they aren't being pulled on when the ash pan is removed and in 2 years I haven't had a problem with the snap disks needing to be reset. .    It is very easy to clean, it takes me about 30 minutes to clean out the stove pipe, remove the back plate and vacuum out the entire stove. No more bolts holding the plates in place, the back plate is held in place with two dog ear clips that are very easy to remove.

The stove puts out about 52,000 BTUs and heats the downstairs to about 69 degrees when the thermostat is set to 72 degrees. The upstairs gets some radiant heat but we like it cooler in the bedrooms anyway.

Our installer had it running on "automatic" (fire starts slow and small then gradually builds up and as it gets close to the set temp it begins to slow down again) with a flame setting of "+3".  The stove wasn't putting out as much heat as I thought it should and it was running dirty.

This year I had to have the paper gasket for the blower replaced with a silicon gasket I asked the repair guy about my concerns, he told me to run the unit on "manual" (fire starts and remains large and hot until the set temp is reached then it shuts down) vs "automatic" (where the fire starts slow, gradually builds then as the temp gets close to the thermostat setting it would gradually reduce).  

He also had me reduce the flame setting from "+3" to "-3" (more than half as much pellets as it was using for each burn cycle and the flame is hot and fast). Not sure why they don't number the settings 0 to 10 but whatever.  

Since I made those adjustments the unit has been running much more efficiently. It burns hotter and uses less pellets each burn cycle.  There is less ash in the stove and pan and less grime on the glass.

When the outdoor temp drops below about 30 degrees the furnace will fire up.

Last year we went through 4 tons of pellets last year due to the extremely long winter.

the stove will run fine via generator but can be run off a 12 volt car battery for about 6 hours.

From a cost perspective - 4 tons of pellets (269 per ton) and 1 tank of oil (275 gal @ 3.24 per gal) cost me about 2,000 dollars.  Running oil only ( 3.5 tanks a year) would cost me about 3,100 dollars.

Good point.

The pellet stove has saved me a substantial amount of money over electric heat in my family. We added the 600 sqft room and I installed electric heat. The first winter our heating bill went up 300 a month. I installed the pellet stove for heat and for about 1.5 tons of pellets I can keep the room and a large portion of the original house at 70 degrees Nov to Apr for between 450 and 600 dollars depending upon the pellets I buy.

eta - a small power inverter and a car battery will run the stove during a power outage if you do not have a generator.

Harman P68

Heats my 2 story house............

My friend uses a wood stove to supplement his heat. He likes it, but when he isn't home the stove isn't running so what is the point. I just leave a half-bag or two so the wife can fill up our stove and it keeps on running.

One other point my wife would like to make is that the pellet stove is much more child friendly. You can touch any part of it except the glass and not get a bad burn (A few parts get hot, but not searing hot), which was a big selling point.

my brother had a free standing pellet stove that threw out a tremendous amount of heat and did a great job at heating most of his 3000+ sg ft house...

I have a fireplace insert made by Napolean that barely heats up my 1500 sq ft ranch...once the temps dip below 20 dg F and the wind picks up, it is pretty useless.

With the price of oil dropping this year, I am not even bothering with the pellet stove..

You need to talk to an expert who can look at your house and make sure you are not making a mistake. A friend put one in his living room, straight exhaust 6 feet outside, cleans it weekly. Keeps the house hot in the middle and cold in the bathroom.

I'm putting in a pellet furnace and ducting the heat to the bedrooms and bath. Depends on your house and lifestyle. Check with someone in person.

I've had one for many years.  It's an off brand that I picked up at Sutherlands.  I go through about 50 bags of pellets every winter, it's just supplemental to the electric baseboard heaters, but it cuts the electric bill in half.  It does suck when the power goes out, but the cheap generator from Harbor Freight is enough to run it.  



I say go for it, it can't hurt.  Maybe you hate it and sell it in a year, maybe you love it and are happy forever.  

I agree with this. I have one, because it came with the house. It's actually cheaper to pay for the natural gas furnace than just the pellets. That's not factoring in the cost of buying or installing the stove, or the electricity it uses.

Harmon is the way to go.  Made in the US and very well made at that.  We use to run both a wood stove and oil hot air.  I put in a Harmon pellet stove to offset the oil.  We ended up, after a very cold winter here in Maine, using less than 100 gallons of oil.  The winter before we used 500 gallons of oil.  We used oil only when we went away for more than a day and also to keep the basement from freezing when it fell below 15 degrees.  



I have an old farm house that is long.  I have the pellet stove on one end, which is below the bedrooms and the wood stove on the other end in the kitchen.  We run just the pellet stove until it gets below 25 degrees and then I start up the wood stove to suppliment.  It is also a very good idea to have the wood stove in case we loose power we can still heat the house well.



So, all toll, we went though 3 tons of pellets, 1,5 cord of wood and about 90 gallons of oil.  That is compared to what we use to use, which was 550 gallons of oil and 3 cord of wood.  



Get the Harmon with the thermostat and electric starter.  That way it runs like a furnace and shuts it self off when it gets too warm and turns itself on when it needs to heat again.

I'll give you a hint: leave it on for constant heat, it will maintain a small ember at the bottom then add more pellets when you need some heat. Having the stove turn on and off will eat through the ignitors very quickly, they can be hard to find sometimes.