Wood Pellet Stoves

[Gus]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help me out here...

What with the ever rising prices of oil and coal, we've been considering installing a domestic wood pellet stove with which to heat both the water and the central heating.

After doing some calculations, we reckon we can save about half of what we spend on oil (about £400/year) and, if we were to replace the multifuel stove in the living room with another, smaller wood pellet stove, we could more than halve what we now spend on coal.

Wood pellet stoves would appear to be environmentally sound and, after the cost of the initial outlay (which can be cut up to a third with grants) would let us be warmed by a renewable and sustainable energy source for a fraction of our current costs.

However, the closest place we know of who sell and install these stoves is near Melrose. (There was an ad in the P&J the other day, but I've not heard back from the gentleman who placed it).

Does anyone have a pellet stove?

We have a couple of brochures which show how the pellets are fed through a hopper into a fairly normal-looking stove on an electronic timer system, but have yet to see one working and yet to determine with what regularity the sacks of pellets (akin to the wood-chip cat-litter) can be delivered to Caithness. Also, what would happen in a prolonged power-cut?

Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks...

[unicorn]

I can give u used rabbit shavings in abundance lol,,,

[JAWS]

Gus, have you thought about a solid fuel Rayburn or similar. They will take coal, wood, peat, in fact whatever solid fuel comes to hand.
That way you are not tied to having to get one particular type of fuel and you can take whatever is available or cheapest at the time. .

[sassylass]

My experience with a wood pellet stove is that is worked great until the power went out, then the fan to circulate warm air didn't work. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Gus]

Thank you, Jaws, but I reckon we've looked at all the options and the pellet stove option would seem to be the one which suits space/time/lifestyle constraints.

The environmental element is important to us, as is the flexibility of being able to, say, just heat the water or the radiators - or both - by some non-electrical means (there is always the immersion) at the flick of a switch.

Sassylass has confirmed two of my worries, though. Those being the power-cut problem and the noise of a fan instead of the crackle of kindling and coal.

Sassylass, which stove did you have experience of? Was it recently?

Thank you for your replies, and if I can help Unicorn out with any chicken shavings, let me know!


Advice still sought. Decisions will need to be made soon...

[paris]

Hi Gus,
Stick with the multi burner! when we lived in caithness we used to buy a permit to go to the forest at rumpster and collect our own wood.(ok if you have your own chainsaw) it worked out very cheap and gave us a day out.
That was for a rayburn, but i used to have an aga. best thing we ever had, it did the heating,via radiators, hot water and cooking .