Everything you need to know about Pellets

Here is the link to the Pellet Fuels Institute a non profit organization that offers the Institutional and Residential user of pellets a wide range of information

Here is a link to their cost calculator

I have added the link to the blog roll as well

Your Stories – Tom’s Maxim Pellet Boiler

There is of course no ONE way and no ONE solution to using less energy.

I invite you to send me your stories about what you are doing.

Here is Tom’s. What is new here is Tom’s choice of a Pellet Boiler. Something like this will be used as an experiment in the French School on PEI. So keeping up with Tom is a good foretaste of how our schools might be heated. It’s also not a system seen here on PEI yet for residential and it will be great to follow Tom and Gail over the winter and see how it works.

Rob Paterson and I have a healthy back and forth.  He, the veritable “Doctor of Doom and Gloom” and I, the “Flower-Sniffing Eternal Optimist”.  We both like to think the truth lies in the middle I imagine…  Perhaps that’s just optimism too.

And so on.

But of all of Rob’s great advice and commentary – yeah, most goes in one ear and out the other -  there was one thing he discussed that rang with clear resonance, clear enough to cut through the ever-present thick fog of this fairyland optimist:   that was his admonishments about “peak oil”.

Woe…  Peak Oil.

The owners of a typical two-story, 2000 square foot house, situated in picturesque Eastern Connecticut, my wife Gail and I have had the increasingly unhappy choir of filling the 250 gallon fuel oil tank that feeds the oil-fired boiler in the basement.    Not ten years ago, we were paying 55 cents per gallon for heating oil.   My last fill-up at US $4.35 per gallon.

Rob was right; oil was getting in short supply…  Soon, we’d see this so called peak oil thing.  Indeed, it was time to revisit home-heating.

To make a long story short (blogs by definition must be short stories)  I ultimately purchased the Maxim 250 pellet boiler. I decided on this system for the following reasons:

-          Fully enclosed and insulated, it can be set-up outside, with just the piping run indoors.  Essentially two pipes, both are freeze resistant and encased in insulating material;  the pipes consequently need not be buried below the frost line.

-          Pellet-fired stoves and boilers vary in efficiency.  The Maxim 250 is rated as 95% efficient.

-          The Maxim 250  is capable of heating upwards of 3000 square feet of living space, including the accommodation for multiple buildings.  Maxim also makes a smaller unit, the Maxim 175.

-          Any pellet will fire in the Maxim…  Corn, wood of any kind, even cherry-pits.  It makes no difference since the temperature is computer controlled.

-          As I mentioned above, water is maintained at a constant temperature.  This, by an onboard computer that automatically feeds the pellets into the fire box at the proper rate.   Incidentally, some pellets burn hotter and slower than others – hence the need for temperature control.

-          I’m configuring my new pellet boiler to work with a heat exchanger that will pre-heat the water that’s fed into my oil-fired  boiler.  When properly set, the pellet boiler will keep the water hot enough to preclude the oil-burner from firing.  If the pellet boiler ever fails – no problem; the oil burner will start as it would normally.  The device can configured for all the usual heating applications such as, forced hot air, radiant heat, and so on.

That’s it for the device…  Now the metrics.

-          We estimated that it would cost $4000 to heat the house with oil this winter.  That assumes oil prices remained in the $4.00 per gallon range, we experience a normal winter, and we heat the house to temperatures as is our custom.

-          Based on the current price of pellets, and in consultation with the pellet stove dealer who sold me the device, we estimated that we would use approximately $750.00 pellets, not only for the winter, but for an entire year.  Here’s a link to a calculator that helps calculate savings based on existing heating and hot water costs.

-          The boiler costs $8500 delivered,  and with installation, we expect to have invested $9,200.  Here’s a link to a quick video that describes the system set-up.

Here are a few other options I considered.

-          Pellet stoves…  This was my first idea.  The prices range from $2500-$5000 depending on capacity and so forth.  In the end, you end up with a convection hot air system that dries out the air, creates drafts (as it pulls in fresh air from outside).  And a fire source inside the house.

-          Word burning boilers.  Vastly inefficient and just as costly, these systems pollute the neighborhood and require stacks of cord-wood in your yard.  Moreover, keeping these systems stoked takes time and effort.  On the bright side – they’re the cheapest option ($850-$3500).  Here’s a link to a number of outdoor wood boilers.  A little less money to buy, perhaps more expensive to fuel.

-          Electric Heat…  Operating costs seem lock-stepped with oil…  What would be the point.

-          Geothermal…  I read something on Rob’s Blog about up and coming Geothermal.  It looks rather promising, but requires lots of deep trenches to fit huge arrays of cooling pipes.  Nah.  Too much of a science project for me.

Seth Godin wrote in his blog the other day, that sometimes fixing one thing makes all the difference.  He went on to opine how one company could make some changes to its customer service, how another needs to work on its waiting times and lastly, Joe Biden needs to work on his brevity…

I thought if I could fix one thing at home, it would not be purchasing a hybrid car, getting a solar array or installing a wind farm – it would be this pellet furnace.  Just knowing that I wont be sending $4000 dollars to the middle east this year is indeed a comfort.

PS Neither Tom or I have any interest in Maxim – this blog will be frank about products and services but is not in any way connected to any other than as fellow users

Pellet Stoves and Pellets

Our Granny Flat is about 1,000 square feet. We wanted it to be separate from the heating of the main house – to give us more moves. So we retrofitted a Pellet Stove. With much lower operating temperatures, the installation is much easier than a regular stove and so for retrofit less hassle and less money.

This Stove fills from a hopper from behind and the load will last a day of hard heating in peak load time such as February. In the peak period you will use about a bag a 24 hour period. Much less in the shoulder seasons.

Not all pellets are the same. Here is a link to ones that work well and that are available from Home Hardware and later this fall from Home Depot.

Regular cleaning is essential – it takes about 20 minutes a week. During the season I will do a short video on our cleaning routine.

Pellet prices are up a lot from last year when they were Cdn 4.99 a bag. Now they are just under $7.00!!!. Who knows what the supply demand equation will be like? My bet is that if we can scale up pellet use on PEI, that we will get the advantage of scale.

More on this later when I visit the site of a school on PEI that will experiment this winter with a very large pellet furnace.

What is my biggest lesson in the last 5 years? Insulation!!!

I tend to be too early in most things – yes I paid a fortune for a DVD player when there were also no DVD’s. It has been the same for saving on my oil bill. But while being silly – I am not stupid in that I do learn from my being too early. Here is what I have done (bought and installed every toy out there – wood boiler, wood stoves, pellet stoves, solar water heater, new windows) and now I will tell you what I have learned.

What I missed from the outset was that the best bang for my buck would come not from new sources of heat but from losing less heat. I sort of got that when we replaced at huge cost most of our windows. This was a 5 year project and of course it does help. BUT it is very very expensive.

What I missed is that we should have R50 in the roof. Very simple and compared to windows – very cheap. The contractor comes for a quote this Saturday. We only have R12 now. I will tell you more after he has given me the lowdown. If you have a new house it is best to have R60-80 installed.

The big lesson in all of this is to find the best way to cut consumption. The experts say that we can cut up to 35% of our use of heat by really insulating well. Here is a neat short video made by our own Sara Fraser (no slouch in her own life either as this interview with her will show you as she demos her own solar water heater) of the CBC that tells us more about the opportunity and how inexpensive this can be. Here is the  CMHC site that has a lot of information on insulation.

So I have done all of this in reverse. I should have started with simple insulation.

By the way (Link to my own story here) Then link will tell give you a lot of detail on my high efficiency wood stove that heats my entire house.  It shows you a lot about the workings and the installation of the pellet stove that we put into our Granny Flat and talks about pellet fuel – all pellets I have found are not the same.

The solar heating is something that I want to give a post too – after 2 years we are just getting this right. I will also post soon on my biggest single failure – my wood boiler. Also later the issue of wood itself – what I am learning abut storing it, using it and selecting it.