Pellet stove for just using cottage on weekends in harsh winters?

Easy to find a stove to heat that size cottage, but to run that long is going to be tough.

Welcome to the Forum

Snowy

Only a handful of stoves could go that long without some kind of tending the pot or ash removal etc. Cottage is smaller than my garage.

wilyum said:

Hi everyone, first time poster here, great site. I am looking at a pellet stove for a small cottage here in Northern Ontario, 20x16, 2x6 insulation, one story. We are just there on weekends, and my question is, would there be a pellet stove that would allow us to fill up on Sunday night and leave it running until we return the following Friday? Ive read some have hopper extensions, that will add a few days of run time, but five days total? Obviously we'd probably be looking at the biggest stove possible to be able to last this long, but at the same time it would only run at a temp low enough to keep the pipes from freezing. Could a hopper extension be fabricated to accommodate 5 days worth of pellets? Thanks!

can drop to -40 here.

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Hello
The stove with the largest hopper that I know of is made up there in Canada. This big 300 pounder holds about 7 bags of pellets! You might be able to add an extension too!

One of my local customers has one, it works good!
See
http://www.amazon.com/Pelpro-Pellet-Stove-300-Lb-HHPP32BD/dp/B000LF2C9Q

Video


You can also put a nice Internet T-Stat on it so you can check the temp and change the settings from your smart phone.
See the one I install here.
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/enviro-ecobee-eb-stat-02-install-pics.125728/

Good luck
Hope this helps.

you could go with the pdvc 25 like mine, get 2 hopper extensions and piggyback them. I just have 1 hopper extension on mine but from what i can see its feasible if you get some extra gasket material, some machine screws and nuts and really torque them down. just add the original lid to the top extension. on a setting of 2 that could easily get you 5 days.

make sure you can lift a 40 lb bag of pellets over your head safely!

Just read temps can go to -40 so this is a bad idea, because you would need to run at a fairly higher setting and i doubt the stove could make 5 days without scooping the burn pot. maybe try this on a stove with a burnpot stirrer.

good luck

Wouldn't it just be a lot less worry to set the existing heating system on 50, or use heat tapes on the water pipes? It's a small cottage, how many pipes can you have?

The eco-65 could go about 3 days max, and you would still have to do the burn pot cleaning. I would say your into a pellet furnace with a remote hopper. This is one sweet puppy at 50k btu..

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads...d-some-leaks-in-type-l-exhaust-venting.61092/


http://fahrenheittech.com/index.html


This unit is self cleaning and has a 250 hopper extension. I wonder how much they cost, but it looks pretty too.. 6 bags about a 1 bag a day you should be good to go..

That's a long week at -40 (interesting that's the crossover where F and C are the same!). Rigging a hopper extension on an Enviro Maxx-M stands a chance - I've run 1/2 ton of softwood pellets through mine and have only needed to open the door to check things out and clean the glass. Ash bucket not even half full.

A Maxx hopper holds three bags. I've no idea what duty cycle you'd need to keep that small cabin above freezing but on a thermostat with a wide swing I think you might have a chance. I've not tried to see how long my stove will run at less than 3 but my guess is that even on lowest setting it won't run continuously Sunday to Friday on three bags.

Sounds like a neat place, and I'll bet when you get there you would really like it to be warm inside!
- Jeff

A friend of ours has a larger cabin than yours likely with poor insulation. They have used a propane wall heater to hold the temps during the week in a similar outside temperature range (this year colder ) . Once there, they stoke up the wood stove and turn off the propane. I don`t think they leave the water on though JIC... outhouse and hauling water from home.

Is your line from your well or lake buried very deep, insulated and heat traced? Septic line buried very deep? Even though our water line is buried, insulated, heat traced and used steady when the heat trace quit, the line froze. A line to septic that is not buried deep enough will encounter the same problem. Point I'm trying to make is that it is not just the pipes in the house that you have to worry about...

I'd put in a heat pump and a regular wood stove....let the heat pump keep the cottage above freezing and use the woodstove when you are there....you might be able to keep a pellet stove fed with extra hoppers, but there is more to keep them going than just more pellets.

I cant imagine what mine would be like after a week of on/off cycles and no maintenance/cleaning/scraping!!..

I forgot to add on that furnace i mentioned it has an option of a nice grill diffuser so you dont have that big hole in the top. This is best choice, use the heat pump for backup is good idea though.

wilyum said:

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.

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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.

Okay, should have read other comments first! Saw your avg temp is -4F, which means if you set your stove thermostat at 45F, then you have a 50 degree differential. That's a 2 bagger for me.

A stove with a 220lb hopper means you could burn 1 bag a day. For a small well-insulated cottage, it might work.

As far as cleaning is concerned, for me the question isn't how many days can you burn, but how many bags can you burn without scraping or cleaning. I know my stove can go 2 days, and 5 bags without scraping the pot, but because it has a tiny ash pan, I need to vac the ashes out, unless I use Blazers, which are DF pellets.

Lake Girl said:

A friend of ours has a larger cabin than yours likely with poor insulation. They have used a propane wall heater to hold the temps during the week in a similar outside temperature range (this year colder ) . Once there, they stoke up the wood stove and turn off the propane. I don`t think they leave the water on though JIC... outhouse and hauling water from home.

Click to expand...

I'm liking this idea. It seems the easiest and the cheapest. I'm assuming they can get by with one or two 20lb tanks? What I'd do, is use thermal curtains to block off the wet wall area, kitchen sink and bathroom, when you leave, and have the propane wall heater inside this curtained area.

WHat kind of propane heater?? Those wall heaters have about a 65-70% efficiency? It might be cheaper to leave the pellet furnace on low setting with the T stat...Any propane system is going to cost you more than leaving the pellet stove on, if you do the BTU vs dollar output cost.

No doubt it'll cost more operationally, but when I wrote "easiest and cheapest", I do think it'll easier than any pellet stove and the initial cost will be cheaper.

chken said:

No doubt it'll cost more operationally, but when I wrote "easiest and cheapest", I do think it'll easier than any pellet stove and the initial cost will be cheaper.

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True, but a self cleaning pellet furnace that needs attention only once a week sounds pretty tempting to me? Propane does have some risks also...

Here are some more specs on this unit, but i don't believe 99% efficiency..?Or is it possible?

hyfire said:

Here are some more specs on this unit, but i don't believe 99% efficiency..?

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It says 99% "combustion" eff.,Not the same as overall eff.A good pellet stove runs in the low 80's.A direct vent propane,Pilot ign.,runs in the high 70's,add a blower runs in the low 80's.If was my part time cabin would put in an unvented propane for when not there,and pellet or wood or vented propane for when I was.

Well the question is, do you want to look pretty or be frozen?