Buying a Wood Burning Stove - Traditional or Pellets?

Are you thinking about putting a stand-alone wood stove in your home or garage to help heat up the place or save some money on your gas or electric bills?  Depending on what part of the country you live in, you may be able to purchase coal cheaper than wood.  In determining which kind of stove to buy, first do some research and find out which method you would like to use. 

Wood versus Coal:

Advantages of Wood

- Wood is cleaner to handle
- Wood fires are easier to start
- Wood has less ash than coal
- Wood ash is good for garden soil
- Wood flue gases are less corrosive to chimneys
- Wood smoke odor is pleasant
- Wood is better for milder climates when only
a small amount of heat is needed
- Wood can be got for the cost of your labor cutting
and hauling while coal must be purchased

Advantages of Coal

- Coal takes less space to store
- High heat output
- Long lasting, steady heat
- Flue deposits easier to clean
with bituminous

When choosing a woodstove, you have a few different types to consider.  There are two different firebox configurations that meet EPA emissions requirements.  The first one is called a “non-catalytic” or “non-cat” stove.  This stove achieves clean burning of wood by preheating the combustion airflow into the firebox where it mixes with the combustion gases and efficiently burns more of the gases before it goes up and out of your chimney.  The other kind of stove has a catalytic combustor.  These stoves also burn clean and were used with the early models of stoves when the EPA first came out with regulations to govern stove emissions.  These catalytic stoves require more effort to maintain.  First, a warm chimney is needed to maintain proper draft to keep the catalytic combustor working.  Also, you must pay attention to the temperature gauge because you must engage the bypass for the smoke to route into the catalytic honeycomb when the temperature reaches 550 degrees for at least 15 minutes.  Sounds like a pain in the rear to me.  And of course, frequent inspection and cleaning is also needed to make sure everything works properly.

There is another kind of stove that due to it’s size and weight, does not fall under the EPA emission standards for wood stoves.  These are called masonry heaters.  These are generally big heaters and are most likely built rather than bought at your local stove store or on eBay.  Basically the premise behind the masonry heater is a load of wood is burned once or twice a day and that heat is routed through internal flue passages which store and conduct the heat, thereby releasing the radiant heat throughout the day.

Believe it or not, you do have one more option with a wood burning stove.  A wood pellet stove will give you the warmth and cozy feeling of a regular wood burning stove but without the work and maintenance involved in the other kinds of stoves.  These low-emission stoves burn a white-wood sawdust pellet that is formed from by-products of the wood industry.  One thing to consider with a wood pellet stove is that you do need electricity to operate it.  The stove works on a hopper system and an electric motor powers an auger to feed the pellets into the firebox.  An electric fan is used to vent exhaust gases and a convection fan is used to circulate the room air over a heat exchanger.    

A benefit to using the pellet stove is the pellets produce far less ash than a traditional wood stove and have virtually no creosote buildup to cause a chimney fire.  Here is something to think about if you already have a wood burning stove or prefer using a traditional stove, you can buy a pellet basket to use in your regular wood stove.  It is typically a vented metal box that holds the pellets while they burn in your firebox.  While not as efficient as a pellet stove, a basket equipped, airtight stove won’t build up creosote.

- MotherThumper