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What are your thoughts on pellet stoves?

Steve Maxwell

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Would you like to heat your home with no net effect on greenhouse gas emissions? Steve Maxwell gives a homeowner advice on the pros and cons of using a pellet stove.

casaGURU-pellet_stove_overall-Steve Maxwell

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Q: What are your thoughts on pellet stoves? Our woodstove has gone kaput, and we're thinking of switching to pellets. What's it like living with a pellet stove?

A: We’ve used a pellet stove here at our house for three winters, and it works well. Most units require three minutes of superficial cleaning every day, plus a more thorough, 20-minute cleaning every week or two. All in all, I find a pellet stove less work to operate than a woodstove. They also exhaust through a wall vent. No need for a chimney.

As for pellets, we have them delivered to our door on skids, three in all, with 75 bags per skid. It takes my son and I about 60 minutes of slugging to carry all the bags into the basement and stack them.

Our stove is a Kozi, made in Winnipeg, and except for a few technical glitches at first, the unit has proven reliable. Friends of mine use a Harman and they’re quite pleased.

Pellet stoves provide heat at substantially lower cost than oil or gas appliances, but there’s potential trouble on the horizon. Most wood heating pellets are made from wood waste – typically planer shavings or sawdust. But as pellet stove sales soar, it’s possible that pellet prices will rise as demand outstrips the supply of raw materials. Currently there are more than 750,000 pellet stoves burning each winter in North America, with more than 70,000 new ones being sold each year. Researchers are working hard to perfect pellets made from bark and farm-raised grasses, but most current pellet stoves can’t burn them because of their high ash content. All this said, I still think pellet stoves make sense. They’re also carbon-neutral, contributing no net effect on greenhouse gas emissions.