Wood burning stoves and wood pellets

[woolybanana]

Out of interest has anyone tried a panier à pellets in their wood burner as a means of burning the little wood pellets?

Something like this: http://www.leboncoin.fr/bricolage/405776948.htm?ca=18_s

It would save storing tons of wood.

[idun]

Have you any idea how that contraption works Wooly?

And I have looked at pellet stoves, and was wondering about getting one in England, but I would have had trouble getting the pellets. The good thing I found about them was that a pellet stove has a built in feed system and you just have to pop a fill up bag in the back and it sorts itself out to the temperature required, and will just drop a few pellets at a time onto the cinders or whatever you call the bit that is burning. So I cannot work out what that thing is that you put into a fire, as it looks like it holds a lot of pellets.

How much space pellets take up, I don't know. But I would think that they'd need to be stored somewhere dry, where as at least wood can be keep outside and just have a cover over the top.

Curious about that contraption though and what it does, exactly.

[woolybanana]

It is filled with pellets and popped into the stove which is then lit.

[powerdesal]

Wooly, I don't think it will work in any controllable way.

[suein56]

[quote user="woolybanana"]It is filled with pellets and popped into the stove which is then lit.[/quote]

Having been shown round a house for sale, by the owner, in winter a couple of years ago, and with the house lovely and warm, I commented on the neat, red stove in the corner of the salon/sejour. This was the first pellet stove I had seen. The owner explained he had researched these stoves extensively as he and his wife ran a taxi/ambulance service and were oncall 24/24 so they needed controllable, reliable heat at all hours of the day and night, with minimum intervention by them.

He showed me the small hopper in the back of the stove where the pellets were stored and the tiny burner at the front. I found it incredible that so much heat could be generated by such a minute stove. But I appreciated the evidence that very cold day.

So re your query WB ... the thought of loading a canister of pellets into a wood-burning stove scares me enormously. I would be terrified by the force of heat it might produce.

And according to the blurb on the canister site the 15kg bag of pellets do not last long. The specially designed pellet stoves, especially the Italian ones, seem to make a lot more efficient use of a 15kg sack.

We sometimes use the compressed wood logs for our insert fire and, as it says on the packaging, you should not use more than one log at a time ... and boy is it true. Compressed wood - the same as in the pellets - really chucks out heat.

Sue

[woolybanana]

Thank you all. I already use a small quantity of pellets and the do give out excellent heat, but as PD says, control would be a real problem as far as I can see.

[idun]

And as I tried to describe, the videos I saw, meant that the pellet stove could be programmed completely, lighting itself and have a thermostat on it too.

Don't buy this contraption Wooly, but if you have somewhere dry to store the pellets and can afford a proper pellet stove, I reckon that it would be a good idea and great investment.

 

When we were installing stoves I called a few places and the pellets were not easily available then, so the investment I made was in a soapstone woodburner.

[Quillan]

I once saw something that didn't use pellets but sawdust. It was like a vertical drum, about the same size as those big oil drums. Sawdust was packed in the internal space, a lot of it, around a pipe which was then removed and there was a control vent at the bottom. It really did throw out the heat, the nearest you could get to it was about 1.5M when it was running and boy did it thrown out some heat. I often though thought of getting one as there seems to be a lot of wood cutting places round here with piles of sawdust outside. Unfortunately they seem to be wise to this type of thing and they charge a lot for the sawdust.

Found a film on YouTube, not quite what I saw but pretty close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMdRRhVJorY

[powerdesal]

the site :- http://www.bois-de-chauffage.net gives lots of pellet suppliers in France.

[andyh4]

I do nto know if things have changed in the last couple of years but when I last looked most pellets were actually sourced from Canada - irrespective of which French merchant was selling them

[Ivor Nidea]

If you wish to convert a normal woodburning stove to one burning pellets in a bid to gain more heat could this device be worth buying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxQSnIxXi8

A quick look on Amazon sees them at around £145.

I have no idea what an improvement it could make but I am considering buying one. Perhaps somebody on here can tell me, or Fyffe, how effective they are.

[woolybanana]

Interesting idea and basic but the price is a bit iffy. Perhaps a bit of a gimmick.

[powerdesal]

I've often thought about using a thermo-electric fan but I really need one with an angled base as the woodburner is a high top Hunter unit with no flat surface to mount the fan on.

No-one seems to advertise what I am looking for, something with possibly an adjustable magnetic base plate. Or even a semi-circular base that could clamp or stick magnetically to the vertical flue outlet from the stove.

Has anyone come across one that matches the requirement?

[woolybanana]

Make one or get it made up?

[idun]

There were a few different ones on youtube and you have me wondering just how well they work. I would think if we end up something like this it will home made, as our main stove is 1622mm high, so the fan would need to direct downwards. Also 'our' design would be a lot cheaper.

I am all for getting as much heat back into the room from a stove. Hence, against advice, as it being 'prettier' we didn't have an inglenook and our stoves are in the room, with the metal chimney in the room, entering the wall and chimney proper a metre or so higher.

And if you are wondering what sort of stove is so high, well it's a Contura 26T high, and mine has the oven in it. I would have loved a Nuuna Unni, but they didn't seem to want to sell to England. Tulikivi are available in France, but I couldn't find them in the UK.If I was buying now, I would probably look into Willach KG soapstone fires from Germany.

In another room, which is not often used we also have a Contura 52T which is normal height, so one of these fans would probably work well on there.

[idun]

I must add that I could get a fan put into my 26T, but I think it expensive and there would still be heat above the internal fan as there is a layer of soapstone, so how well it would work, I don't know.

 

[powerdesal]

I suspect that I am going to have to make one as you say Wooly, just another project to add to the existing long list.

[nomoss]

We have used wood pellet stoves since I bought a Kozi on ebay in September 2008.

The wood pellets we have bought have all been produced in France, from Languedoc, Central France or Les Landes.

To get the best price one usually has to buy a full pallette of one ton. This has usually lasted a full winter, but our house (ca.120 m2) is very well insulated. I can legally load a ton by distributing it between my VW camper van and my trailer, so can pick this up in one trip. Delivered prices can make the cost much higher unless one buys in larger quantity.

This winter we paid 4€50 TTC per 15kg bag from a supplier 22 km away. I could have bought cheaper, but the extra distance wasn't worth the saving I would have made.

Ideally they should be stored indoors, a garage is OK, but outside under a plastic "tarp" they tend to eventually get a little damp, causing problems with the feed system and with initial lighting. You should also make sure they have been stored inside by the supplier.

When the weather is not too cold we use our air to air reverse cycle aircon system, which is cheaper to run than the stove, until its efficiency drops with colder weather. In any case, at mild temperatures the stove makes the house too hot, even in its standby, lowest burn, mode. Below about 10º the efficiency of the heat pump has dropped, and the temperature difference with the outside reaches a point where it is no longer enough to heat the house, and we turn the stove on.

We keep the living areas around 20º, or less, depending on how active we are. We save fuel by turning the stove off at night, except in the coldest weather, as the indoor temperature only drops a couple of degrees during the night.

I removed the Kozi stove and installed it in our new house just after we bought it. When the old house, where we were still living, hadn't sold by winter, I bought an italian, Ravelli, pellet stove. I found the price in Italy was far less than in France, so I contacted Sr Ravelli at the factory, who gave me details of an excellent dealer near Imperia.

We drove there, collected the stove (they had an enormous stock and range of stoves of all kinds), bought the necessary chimney sections - supplied complete with silicone rubber gaskets (see below), adapters, clamps, etc. - at a fraction of the french price, and for a far superior quality, stayed overnight in San Remo, and were home near Carcassonne the following afternoon.

We were still in pocket, had had  a pleasant break, and had all the bits and pieces to install the stove with no hassle. compared with the nightmare I had ordering, waiting weeks, returning wrong parts, ordering missing parts, and finally getting all the right bits to install the first stove, from a "specialist" in Narbonne. He was the only one I found who would even supply chimney parts without supplying a stove, but he refused to supply the silicone rubber gaskets specified by the manufacturer. He said they were not allowed by "les normes", so I had to buy them elsewhere, with further delays.

The italian stove is prettier than the canadian Kozi, but only holds about 1 bag of pellets in its hopper, compared with 2 1/2 bags in the Kozi hopper.

The italian electronics are more complicated, with far too many options, in my opinion, and every "fault" results in a long wait and cool down period before a re-light is permitted. The Kozi is reassuringly "agricultural" in construction, with a minimum of spurious "features", and very easy to understand, service, and repair. All the parts are available, quite a lot on ebay.