NDR Corn v Pellet Stoves?-update

Tom Wall

Tom Wall

Well-known member
My wife and I are considering getting either a corn or pellet stove as supplemental heat for our home. At this point the stove we are leaning towards apellet stove by Harman. I guess it can burn a pellet corn mixture too.

A little history. We live in an old, solid brick home with an under sized gas forced air furnace. The home also had a wood stove when we moved in but my wife is very sensitive to smoke so the wood stove went bye-bye.

Corn is readily available locally. The store where we will most likely buy the stove claims they are always able to supply their customers with pellets.

Does anyone have experience with either or both? Positive and negative comments please.

Thanks,

Tom
 
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Tom,
I have run a St.Croix pellet stove I have been using for the past 3 years. I have NOTHING bad to say about it. My home is approximately 1900 square feet with a rather open standard "Cape" style layout. Since our switch from gas to pellet our home went from 68 degrees to 75degrees, nice and toasty. We save a boatload of money even though the house is warmer. I could save another $50 throughout the heating season if I kept the temp. around 68 but the wifes happiness is well worth it.

It is extremely easy to run. I shake it down twice a day and add pellets when needed...thats it! Oh yeah, I have to empty my ash pan and vacume out the inside of the stove twice through the heating season. I have a friend that runs a Quadrafire dual fuel stove. He tried the corn but uses pellets exclusively now. He found the corn to be much more work and burns more corn to keep the same temperature. We live in an area that has corn VERY plentiful, but I have never had a problem getting pellets.

Pull the trigger, it will be worth it!

Good luck,
Gene
 
We ended up buying a corn stove after visiting the local store that specalizes in pellet stoves. They only wanted to sell us an upper-end stove like the Harmon XXV. My wife and I really like the XXV but, it is not what we wanted.

We bought a Magnum Baby Countryside corn stove that had been used as a demo stove for 2 years. The stove is rated to heat 1400 sq. ft. and puts out between 7,000 and 40,000 btu/hr. The price was great. After connecting to our existing chimney and getting the chimney swept we still stayed under our $2000 budget. It's amazing how much that double-walled 3" stove pipe costs!

It took us a little while to figure out how to run the stove efficiently, trial and error. But, it is definatley easy to operate. With 5 college degrees between us we were over-analyzing the problems! My mother-in-law talked us through most of our problems. Nothing quite as resourceful as a farm girl from southeast Ohio who grew up through the depression.

I can see where there may be a little more clean up with a corn stove versus as pellet stove. My wife likes to keep things clean and cleans the stove every day. It takes her less than 10 minutes.

Our hope was to reduce our heating costs since our gas budget from Columbia gas had gone up to over $200/month. And, we don't keep our house very warm.

We have been very happy with the corn stove. Our house is much warmer. We keep the thermostat on our gas furnace set at 68 degrees. We usually kept it colder in previous winters. When outside temps are in the 30's or higher the furnace rarely kicks on. When it does come on it runs for only 2-3 minutes. We have had a night as cold as 14 degrees so far, unusual for Dec in central Ohio. The furnace kicked on every 15 mins and ran for 5 minutes or less.

We just got our first real gas bill. Yeasterday we go one that the gas company estimated from previous years usage and the weather we had. The bill was for almost $320. We have switched to having a monthly reading done this winter. After adjustment with the real reading our gas bill was just $93! We spent $90 on corn for a heating bill of $180. That's a $140 savings in the first month! And, our ectric bill was down about $30. The two small fans on the corn stove draw less electricity than the big fan on the furnace. At this rate the stove will pay for itself this winter. And, our home is much more comfortable.

Another upside of the corn stove is corn availability. I have found a farmer on the edge of town that also heats with a corn stove. He has 3 10,000 bu bins full of dry corn. I will be able to go out and get corn when ever I need it. The price is also right, $3.80 for 56 lbs or $135/ton. That is less than pellets and corn has more btu's/lb.

Tom
 
Pellet fuel is a terrible thing to get right now. I just got a letter from our buying group concerning big shortages in pellets. Take that for what it's worth but you may corner the sales person and see if he tries to BS his way out of it.
 
Tom. a few questions as we too have been trying to decide between wood, pellets and corn as a backup heat source.

- Don't you have to buy pre washed corn to keep the dust down or is that what you were discussing with your wife's 10 minute daily stove cleaning, and does the corn have to be at a certain moisture level?

_ Do the fans on the corn stove only run with electricity? I want a back up heat source that does not rely on electricity.

Thanks for any help. Mike
 
Mike,

No, the corn we are burning is straight from the bin. The farmer has a grain dryer, the corn is very dry. I haven't had it tested but my family farms and is in the seed business so I know by feel of the corn it is dry. There is a little dust when I fill the hopper but, it isn't bad. The corn needs to be no more than 15.5% moisture or it may mold during storage. Most grain elevators that you would buy bagged corn from will have dried the corn. If you buy corn from a local farmer you want to find one that has a grain dryer, not a bin fan with a heater on it, a seperate grain dryer. You may also want to have the moisture content verified if you are buying a lerger quantity.

What my wife does daily is clean the clinker and ash out of the fire pot. She brushes the fly ash off the sides of the fire chamber. She cleans off the glass front of the door and empties the ash bin. After burning about 60 lbs of corn you could hold all the ash and clinker in your two hands put together.

You don'y have to clean the stove that often. You will need to get the clinker out of the fire pot at least daily. So far, we only have to do it daily. At the higher burn rates it may need to be done more than once. Getting the clinker out can be done in a matter of seconds. Also, some of the stoves have a system that allows the clinker to be dropped into the ash pan while the stove is burning. My wife keeps our home spotless. It isn't dirty when she thinks it is.

The fans are small cage fans that don't draw much current. One blows into the fire pot for combustion and venting. The other fan blows through the heat exchanger to get heat into the home. Most stoves can be bought with a battery back-up. For our stove it was around $500. I bought a 3500 watt portable generator on sale at Cabela's for $299. It will power the stove, wife's fish tank, frig and some lights if we need it.

Let me know if you have anymore questions,

Tom
 
More questions, I got a couple:

How much corn are up burning in a day (with the house up to temp all day)? And how are you transporting and storing the corn?
 
Andrew,

We burned 24 bu. of corn in 30 days. This was a cold late Nov/early Dec for central Ohio. The weather has been more like January.

Let me go into more detail about our stove. It can have a thermostat hooked up to it. We just use 5 pre-set corn feed rates. With temps above 30 degrees we usually have the stove on 1 or 2.

I am buying the corn and putting it in bushel feed bags. I carry thses into my basement for storage. Ideally, I would like to have a small gravity flow wagon that would hold 150 bu. Then I could just go out and fill up a 5 gal bucket once or twice a day as needed. My wife, neighbors and they city will keep me from getting a wagon. What I would like to do is get/build a small storage bin in my basement in the old coal room. I could run the corn in with a spout through either a window or the old coal shoot. I don't think that will happen this winter.

A few more details about my home. It is a 90 yo brick home. The exterior walls are solid brick walls, no insulation, no space for insulation. The stove we bought is designed to heat a 1400 sq ft home. The area we heat is about 2000 sq ft. My wife is already talking about getting a second stove for upstairs. However, she doesn't want the stove set too high at night or it will be too hot for her to sleep??!!

My wife was very wary of getting this stove. She has zero tolerance of any smoke smell. She smells things a week before thet start to stink. During our learning how to run/start the stove we had a couple of incidents where the corn would smolder. You could smell that in the house. She was ready to kill me. As I mentioned above she is now wanting a second or bigger stove.

As Lee has mentioned, pellets in our area are pretty scarce right now. We do use a handful of pellets to light the stove with. The pellets burn at a lower temp than the corn so they are easier to start. Corn burns around 1100 degrees.

It is also nice to sit, with my wife, in front of the stove on a cold night and just watch the fire. I can't put a dollar value on that!

Tom
 
Tom,

I have a Harmon pellet stove that will burn a corn/pellet mix. Mine is a fireplace insert. I have had it for 3 years with no problems. I like the hardwood pellets (less ash). A 40# bag will get me a little better than one day. Hopper holds 60#. When fuel oil went through the roof, there was a panic and pellets were in short supply. Now that things have returned to normal, there is no shortage.

Although the stove was quite expensive, it is reliable and is designed in such a way that replacing a defective component can be done by the owner with relative ease. It burns those pellets to an ash so fine that one ton of pellets accumulates ash that would fit into a two gallon metal bucket - incredible efficiency.

I burned cord wood for 8-10 years and coal for another 6 -7. Wish these stoves would have been around in those days because I would have saved a lot of back breaking work cutting and splitting and had a cleaner house (coal ash).

Thumbs up from my point of view.

Bill
 
Lee,

Part of the shortage rest with two companies doing upgrades on there pellet producing equipment. The plant producing New England Pellets (who supply a large percentage of pellets to Europe) , which is located in New Hampshire, closed down much of their capacity to upgrade. The same situation exists at the Luzon (sp) plant in Quebec. The upgrade was necessary to increase capacity due to increased demand. Who knew fuel oil prices would take off the way they did. So .... if the info I have been given is accurate and I have no reason to doubt it, then availability shouldn't be an issue.

But of course I won't leave anything to chance. I intend to buy 3 tons at the end of the season when prices traditionally drop some. I for one would hate to lose this heat source and depend on oil prices staying low. These oil companies have now had a taste of 4-5 bucks a gallon and you just know they want to return to those revenue levels as soon as possible.

My 2c
Bill
 
two plants use to make the pellets?

I don't know about the two that you mention but the ones that I am familiar with, and that I do business with, rely on the "waste" from mills turning this one time problem into a valuable commodity....

Problem is that "most" mills are barely functioning in this present economy, and the ones that are are running at a much reduced capacity with the result being less, "waste"......

Unless the two mills that you mention have a dedicated tree harvest for their raw material, (non existant in the industry to my knowledge), and unless your area is far ahead of the rest of the country there is no way that there will not be "shortages" in pellet production.....

Steve
 
Since I don't sell the pellets and am going on a letter from the president of a pellet company to the lumber dealer Co_op that I belong to, I hope you are right. I read the letter that was faxed out by the co-op and tossed it since it didn't effect me....wish I'd have kept it on the pile of useless meaningless crap that populates my desk and looks like hell.
 
Steve,

If the pellet industry continues to grow you will get companies making pellets from trees harvested just for pellet production. It happens with any "waste" product that becomes valuable enough.

Tom
 
but even if you are correct that won't impact the short term production so until that happened, (and unless they were harvesting non-mature timber which is unlikely the "wood" wouldn't have a greater value than the pellets), there are likely to be "shortages"......

Imagine the cost of pellets if the source for them is the "tree" and not the waste? Pellet mfg. now includes only the freight for the waste from the mill to the plant, (usually located close to several mills), and then for the finished product to the point of sale.....if, as you suggest, pellet mills started using "trees" the cost would have to reflect the "tree" itself, the cost to harvest it, the coast to reduce it to the stage that it can be turned into pellets, (all of these are not included at this point), and then the above costs......by that point I'd bet that oil will be looking mighty good.....

Steve
 
Steve,

Thus I bought a corn stove. Transportation involved is my driving a little over 1 mile to the farm. Then a little over 1 mile back home.

Tom
 
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