We've had pellet burners here state side for a long while. They have limited popularity. I share the same concern as Kiwi, you lose power, your done. Kind of defeating the purpose, IMO. There are also units that sit outside of the house and transfer the heat indoors. Same problem though. It takes electricity to transfer that heat.

 

Yea if the power goes out the fan blower and the screw feeder stop. They do usually have an autostart function but as long as the power is out no material is being transferred to the furnace. They produce quite a lot of ash too, or so I'm told. Most users here are farmers with own forest and therefore "free" raw material that would otherwise go to waste. Some power plants use them too but as far as I know they burn the bundles as is without pulverising them first.

 

We don't have a pellet furnace so I can't speak to their efficiency, but we DO have a pellet stove insert in our fireplace. Heated our entire home here in New England last winter (1600sf) from December through April on 3 tons of pellets and zero oil. Total cost <$1000 US (the pellets essentially paid for themselves in oil fuel savings!). The amount of ash greatly depends on the wood pellets you buy. I ended up with a brand that produces little ash at all and only needed to clean the stove once every two weeks. 85% efficiency, and our stove will also burn corn alternatives. Make sure it's hooked up to the generator circuit and even if you lose power you still have heat. It's a beautiful thing.

 

We use one for auxiliary heat in the living room. Keep the house at 60 - 63F during the day when we're active, then fire up the pellet stove in the evening. We tried to heat the house with it for a few winters, but with a two-story 2800 sq ft house it didn't work well. Amacadams is right on, some pellets leave little ash and give lots of heat, others give lots of ash and not much heat. We have a generator to run the stove in case of emergency. Hope we never have to use it, but it's there if we do.

 

Burn 4 cords of Hardwood here , Maple & Oak mostly I have to be careful
as it can make the old Vermont Castings Vigilant glow red if I let get
too hot not to mention cracking the tiles in the chimney...... done that
once and what a pain relining it that was.

Nothings better than hardwood heat imo although I was partial to the
old coal fire back in the old country back when they let you burn coal.


Funny I was taking a ride home yesterday and a brand new processor
was on a flatbed rig as I got off the highway

 

Pro wood here too, rare are the things more soothing than a good fire going on a cold winter night in the living room fireplace.

Maple and oak Sprock, I envy you. NWIH those would ever be used for heating here, even to get a piece or two for smoking purposes tends to be tedious. Mesquite even more so as it doesn't grow here. Birch is the wood of choice here as it burns clean and has a pretty good "heat value", some burn coniferous trees too but they crackle and pop and soot up the chimney.

A story came to my mind about hardwood. A friend of mine used to work at a parquet factory round here. They had a shipping container full of planks of different varieties like walnut, jatoba, yarrah, rosegum, oak, red oak and a few others I don't remember, that they shipped to a local school to be planed to a certain size. Surprise they fudged the whole batch so the factory couldn't use them so they parked the container to the yard and announced to the workers that whoever wants can take some of them, my friend happened to have an empty trailer behind his car that he loaded to the brim. When he found out about my guitar building hobby he called me to go take picks from there cause when he tried warming up his house with the planks in his inverted central heating stove they burned so aggressively the bottom grate melted! So I got a good selection of the previously mentioned planks stored away now. Yatoba and yarrah planks are very pretty when lacquered, they have this very deep dark wine red color but they are a biatch to work on cause they're so hard and they weight like lifting pieces of rock. Also have this resin that when warmed up, clogs all saws and sand papers so they're extremely slow to work on. But man they burn! Like they've been soaked in gas.

Btw on a side note -9c this morning. Takes some getting used to after the warm fall, usually gets better around mid april

 

For my money, it's hard to beat white oak for heat. I will say as hardwoods go, ash is almost therapeutic when it comes to splitting it. Now sycamore, that's a whole other story. While it burns well, it will almost drive you insane trying to get into manageable pieces.
Even with a hydraulic splitter mounted on the back of a tractor, it wants to explode rather than split.

 

You burn oak? That's sacrilege. Oak is for furniture and such like. And it costs a small fortune to get it at the lumber yard. Now tamarack, lodgepole, doug fir, that's what we burn around here.

Of course when an acquaintance from back east found out we burn the aforesaid species he was amazed.

Guess it's what grows where you are. I admit I'd rather burn hardwood. Just isn't much around here. Besides, as said earlier, we have a pellet stove.

I do miss the fire in the fireplace though. There's nothing like sitting in a chair with a good book, a cup of hot chocolate and a fire in the fireplace. The pellet stove just isn't the same.

 

Oak is common where I grew up, southern Indiana. Softwoods are pretty rare there.
You can actually cut enough wood for yourself and sell some also just by following the logging companies around and clean up the pile of limbs they leave behind.


The only time you see pine and the like is when somebody plants it.