I'm sure this has been discussed here at length before, but I searched the threads and couldn't find much, so apologies if I'm beating a dead horse...
Up here in SE Alaska we have a lot of hydropower which has yielded pretty low electricity rates in the past. Many houses were built with electric resistance baseboard as their sole source of heat. But over time as the population grew, the electric demand outstripped the supply and rates began to rise. At the same time the price of oil decreased so thousands of houses installed Monitor or Toyo stoves - small free-standing, direct-vented oil stoves. We don't have natural gas up here, and propane is prohibitively expensive, so oil was the only option.
Seemed like a great solution until the price of heating oil skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Now both electric and oil heat are expensive. Lots of people use wood stoves, but we all know that cordwood isn't a solution for everyone for a number of reasons. Pellets, at around $350/ton up here (half the cost is in barging) still offer big savings over oil or electric. And if the demand grows enough, we'll see local pellet mills spring up and then the cost will drop substantially.
Pellet stoves are pretty much a drop-in replacement to Monitor stoves - they're a similar size, can be direct vented, and function pretty much the same way. But there's only one problem - a Monitor is connected to a 250 gallon oil tank, it can run for months before refueling. A pellet stove needs fuel added every day or two. If there was a pellet stove that featured an exterior bulk silo connected to it, with automatic fuel transfer (auger or pneumatic), then the pellet stove could truly replace the Monitor stove.
So why aren't there any? I've surveyed the stove market and haven't found any manufacturers that offer this option. Harman comes close - they have a 1,500 lbs bulk hopper for their PB-105 boiler and the literature states that it's also compatible with some of their stoves, but the sheet metal hopper isn't something you're going to want in your living room, and it isn't suitable for outdoor siting. Anyone out there have one of these connected to their pellet stove? What does the connection detail look like?
This just seems like a huge gap in the market. Pellet stoves are relatively cheap compared to boilers or furnaces. They have lots of flexibility where they can be installed. The newer ones are efficient and relatively low maintenance. They're a great heating solution that are within reach of a lot of people. If they only connected to bulk storage, they'd be a complete solution. I could see hundreds of them being sold up here, and we're just a small market - surely we're not unique. So why hasn't this gap been filled? What am I missing?
Up here in SE Alaska we have a lot of hydropower which has yielded pretty low electricity rates in the past. Many houses were built with electric resistance baseboard as their sole source of heat. But over time as the population grew, the electric demand outstripped the supply and rates began to rise. At the same time the price of oil decreased so thousands of houses installed Monitor or Toyo stoves - small free-standing, direct-vented oil stoves. We don't have natural gas up here, and propane is prohibitively expensive, so oil was the only option.
Seemed like a great solution until the price of heating oil skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Now both electric and oil heat are expensive. Lots of people use wood stoves, but we all know that cordwood isn't a solution for everyone for a number of reasons. Pellets, at around $350/ton up here (half the cost is in barging) still offer big savings over oil or electric. And if the demand grows enough, we'll see local pellet mills spring up and then the cost will drop substantially.
Pellet stoves are pretty much a drop-in replacement to Monitor stoves - they're a similar size, can be direct vented, and function pretty much the same way. But there's only one problem - a Monitor is connected to a 250 gallon oil tank, it can run for months before refueling. A pellet stove needs fuel added every day or two. If there was a pellet stove that featured an exterior bulk silo connected to it, with automatic fuel transfer (auger or pneumatic), then the pellet stove could truly replace the Monitor stove.
So why aren't there any? I've surveyed the stove market and haven't found any manufacturers that offer this option. Harman comes close - they have a 1,500 lbs bulk hopper for their PB-105 boiler and the literature states that it's also compatible with some of their stoves, but the sheet metal hopper isn't something you're going to want in your living room, and it isn't suitable for outdoor siting. Anyone out there have one of these connected to their pellet stove? What does the connection detail look like?
This just seems like a huge gap in the market. Pellet stoves are relatively cheap compared to boilers or furnaces. They have lots of flexibility where they can be installed. The newer ones are efficient and relatively low maintenance. They're a great heating solution that are within reach of a lot of people. If they only connected to bulk storage, they'd be a complete solution. I could see hundreds of them being sold up here, and we're just a small market - surely we're not unique. So why hasn't this gap been filled? What am I missing?
