Pellet Furnaces Are Hot!

Are pellet stoves green? It is a difficult question. The pellet companies call their product carbon neutral, because the carbon that is released when they are burned was sequestered by the trees when they were alive and growing. Others note that the same thing can be said of coal and oil, and that the only difference is the time scale. There is also the issue of the energy consumed chopping the trees, compressing the pellets and moving them around. Collin crunched the numbers on this in his post Pellet Stoves vs. Wood Stoves: Which is Greener?

On the other hand, they are a byproduct of the lumber industry, made from sawdust that might otherwise have gone to the landfill, they are usually relatively local in manufacture, and come from a renewable resource. A study from back in 1995 determined that 6.5 million cubic yards of waste were kept out of landfill by being converted to pellets. After spending some time with Jack Miners, the Ontario, Canada representative for Woodmaster Natural Energy Furnaces, I was impressed.

Woodmaster furnaces come in little doghouse-like structures in need of a good architect. There are installed outside the home, so there is no danger of monoxide buildup or fire in the house. Every day or two, depending on the size or insulation in your home, you dump a bag of pellets into the hopper.

An auger takes the pellets from the hopper and delivers them to the combustion chamber, all electronically controlled. Another auger clears the ash away.

Above the combustion chamber, water is heated and delivered by a circulating pump to your home which could be quite a distance away, where it goes through an water-to air heat exchanger for forced air designs, or to a water-to-water exchanger for hot water radiators or radiant floor systems.

I asked Jack about the availability and cost of wood pellets, noting that two years ago they were in short supply and the costs went up significantly. He said that the stoves were in fact originally designed for corn, but when corn prices went through the roof, they repositioned as pellet stoves. In fact, they can burn all kinds of things, including barley, corn and oats. If a farmer has a load of mouldy grain or more than he can sell, he can always burn it. Also, more and more pellet suppliers are popping up as people realize that it doesn't make sense to throw wood waste away when it can be repurposed and sold for heating.

This obviously isn't an appropriate technology for us city dwellers, and does require a lot more work than a gas furnace. But out in the country it makes a lot more sense than a big oil tank and evidently costs half as much. It replaces oil imported from the middle east or boiled out of Alberta rocks with natural gas, and burns cleaner than oil. So it may not truly be carbon neutral, but it is a step in the right direction. [b]