MikeH in MD wrote:
BLeP wrote:
windywave wrote:
Pellet stove? How exactly does that work?
Pellet stoves are a pain in the ass. You have to pour a new bag of wood pellets in about once a day. You also have to clean it about once a day. Also the pellet bags weigh about 50 lbs. When my FIL was in the hospital I had to drive up there and carry in months worth of bags.
My inlaws had one when they moved in. Basically you fill it in the morning, let it run down overnight, clean it in the morning and fill it again. Horrible, horrible process.
They have replaced it with a furnace.
Try a modern wood stove. Either buy wood and have it delivered and then stack it somewhere you can get to it easily without effing freezing to death in the winter, or have a local tree delivery service dump their scraps for you and then you saw and split it yourself, and then stack it as above. Then you need to feed the damn thing 3-4 splits every few hours. Oh and the modern, two-stage stoves are super sensitive to wood moisture content, so I forgot to add the part where you have to let said split wood "season" for anywhere between 8 and 24 months depending on the wood species. So at any point in time I had somewhere between 3 and 10 cords of wood in some stage of the process scattered freakin' everywhere on my property. I had somehow convinced myself that all of this was a good idea. :-)
Man, y'all are whiny bitches.
Also, if you're feeding a modern wood stove every hour, something is wrong. A firebox full of wood lasts in our stove 4-6 hours.
All fireplaces and stoves need dry wood, if the wood is wet it doesn't burn as cleanly and you end up with tons of creosote in your chimney. If you don't clean the creosote, you get a chimney fire.