trying to make pellets my primary and electrical as the backup when the pellets run out on say wed or thurs, Hydro in this province is supposed to go up 42% in the next five years. I have a friend who runs off radiant baseboard heaters for a cottage a little bigger than mine and it runs him close to $400 month, just weekend use, and at Quebecs much lower rates. Im thinking boiler is a little much for a small cottage like this, electrical radiant flooring im thinking couldn't be a primary source in winters like ours, and no gas lines where we are.
Got it.
The problem to me is that your cottage is small, 320sqft, so that many of the pellet ideas are for giant stoves, with large hoppers, which seems like overkill. The auto clean furnace/boilers that I know of would just about fill your cottage! Okay, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Clearly, you don't have a basement, right?
My first question was whether you could find a stove that had a temp set as low as say, 50F. I just looked at my stove, and yes, you can set it down even lower. So, the next question is, if you set it at say 50F, with an electric thermostat radiant set for 45F near your bath/kitchen as a emergency failsafe, how many BTUs would you burn?
I'm just wondering if you had a stove with a 120lb hopper, set for 50F, that was reliable, and you used DF super premium pellets with little ash and very clean burning, could it last 5 days? That'd be 24lbs a day, or ½ a bag.
For me, an avg winter day is 25F, so setting a thermostat at 50F, would be a 25degree differential. For me, that's a 1 bag day, but I have 3000sqft with 10ft ceilings to heat.
The bottom line is you need to determine a baseline on your heat requirement. That's the only way to know how many pellets your stove would need to heat for 5 days, and whether there's a stove out there that could meet that requirement. It's an interesting problem. I'd even consider dropping the stove thermostat to 45F and the electric thermostat to 40F, to see if that could stretch it out further.
The more I think about it, the more I think in the right situation, this might work, if you tighten up your cottage, and use super premium DF pellets! But you might want to find a used pellet stove that you can use to test to determine how many pellets you'd need to make this work.