Burn a log in a pellet stove?

Thinking this through a little more... Assuming you have a conservative heating season of 120 days in "Mountain/South to the East", and you use the full 20 bags for the season, that's one bag every 6 days.

Hell, even if "Mountain/South to the East" only has a heating season of 90 days, that's still only one bag for every 4.5 days.


Like I said, BS unless "Mountain/South to the East" is in southern Florida...

Wet1 said:

Thinking this through a little more... Assuming you have a conservative heating season of 120 days in "Mountain/South to the East", and you use the full 20 bags for the season, that's one bag every 6 days.

Hell, even if "Mountain/South to the East" only has a heating season of 90 days, that's still only one bag fro every 4.5 days.


Like I said, BS unless "Mountain/South to the East" is in southern Florida...

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And UPS delivers your pellets, Go Brown!

Eric

Lance1 said:

You guys certainly get defensive quickly.

I don't heat my whole house, just areas I spend my time awake in and not while I'm sleeping, maybe 900 sqft and use an electric blanket for sleeping and don't heat this room. I live in Mountain/South to the East, but I do get snow. I do get lows in the single digits.

The way I winterize my house has helped allot. My neighbor that has done nothing in improvements on the same built house, the snow melts completely off his roof while my roof shows no signs that I'm heating, except a little around the stack.

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I think that Lance has been very gracious, considering how much teasing he's having to put up with here. I can relate to Lance, super-insulating his house and modifying his pellet stove. It takes innovators who are willing to take some risk, who come up with new technologies that benefit others. If you can modify a heating device and keep the risk to a low level, go for it, but be very careful to take extra precautions.

I'm just wondering if maybe he's running pelletized uranium in his stove. Heck, once you perfect the technology, you might only need one bag for 10 years! Lance, are you holding out on us? You didn't say exactly what came out of those bags.

Actually, you can run cordwood in a pellet stove. Just throw your splits into a pellet mill and burn your cordwood in small pieces.

Dan

DAGME said:

BTW, this is what makes baseboard hot-water (water has a higher heat capacity, storing more thermal energy) more efficient than a forced-hot air system that uses the same fuel.

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you sure about that? I've always heard that FHA was more efficient, due to the fact that there is only 1 transfer of energy, whereas, with water, there's a bunch. Every time there is a transfer, energy is lost. (fireboilerwaterpipesfinsair, vs. fireplenumair).

Lance1 said:

There is some variables that some have not considered in my situation. Like I don't heat all day, maybe an hour in the morning if the sun is out. The majority of my windows face directly to the South with no obstructions, solar heating. I have mostly sunny days. On cloudy days I heat most of the day on the lowest setting and frequently have to turn it off. I also don't have people running in and out of the house all day like a family would. Allot of heat is lost opening a door.

BTW; Kinetic energy is for motion forces, not thermal transfer.

Addition; Yes I put a bag in maybe every 4-6 days.

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Thanks for the clarification (regarding your heating situation). I have to agree with a poster above that, semantically, the pellet stove is not your main source of heat as you stated. It would be fair to say that, in fact, passive solar is your main form of heat and you occasionally use pellet heat to supplement it. Of course, for those of us (Damned Yankees!) in the north, the idea of heating with 20 bags of pellet seems "suspect".

Regarding your physical definitions - heat (in the way that I was using it) is a measure of kinetic energy.

"Thermal transfer" (more correctly called "heat transfer") is results from the communication of motion (i.e. the kinetic energy) between molecules of one medium to another. In simple terms, excited molecules in air "bump into" molecules in another substance, "transferring" energy (these terms are in quotes because they are not, in the strictest sense, correct in physics terminology). This can be measured by an increase in heat.

This is a site I use with my students: http://www.vias.org/physics/bk2_03_02.html

Sorry for the lecture - but I talk about this kind of stuff 8-10 hours a day.

The only problem with windows is they work against you once the sun goes down losing a significant portion of what might have been gained during the sunny part of the day. Although, you could have R-38 windows to go along with your R-99 house.

So what part of what state do you live in that it's routinely in the 30's, gets down into the single digits, yet is sunny enough to heat your home with basically just the solar energy transferring through your windows, and 17.5 bags of pellets a year?

Lance1 said:

Has anyone ever burned regular firewood in a pellet stove? Any drawbacks besides the low capacity and big mess in the fire chamber?

The reason I ask is my town ran out of pellets one Winter.

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lance1 you should try it, but only you. let me know how it worked out for you.

cac4 said:

DAGME said:

BTW, this is what makes baseboard hot-water (water has a higher heat capacity, storing more thermal energy) more efficient than a forced-hot air system that uses the same fuel.

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you sure about that? I've always heard that FHA was more efficient, due to the fact that there is only 1 transfer of energy, whereas, with water, there's a bunch. Every time there is a transfer, energy is lost. (fireboilerwaterpipesfinsair, vs. fireplenumair).

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Deleted

well..to quote our illustrious webmaster, "a btu is a btu". If you had to pour in twice as much to start with, you're not gaining anything by only having to do it "half as often". you're not going to get 3x the heat w/ 2x btus, because that would be magic. :cheese: Its the law of conservation of energy. you're not getting out any more than you put it. actually, you're not even going to get out WHAT you put in, when there's a transfer.

If this wasn't the case, there'd be hardly any reason to ever do FHA. FHW is so much "nicer", and what you describe (more steady, even heat) is one of the things that makes it nicer; but "cheaper" isn't one of those things.

edit to add: heat "maintained" in water isn't doing anyone any good. its only useful to us when it is transferred into the living space, where it heats me and my stuff...at which point, it is lost to the atmosphere at the same rate, regardless of its delivery system. (convection, radiation, air infiltration, etc.)

OK people be nice
if this guys says he heats with 20 bags then he does

I have lots of customers that only buy 25 bags a year to heat.

Deleted

cac4 said:

If this wasn't the case, there'd be hardly any reason to ever do FHA.

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Far and away the main reason anyone uses FHA is to utilize common ductwork for a centralized air conditioning system in the summer.

In areas of the country where central A/C is not common, BBHW is much more common than FHA, and vice/versa.

Hey, Lance, maybe if you'd just tell us what the heck it was that you did to this house and stove, you wouldn't get so many wise-cracks! :cheese:

by trickling out these little pearls of information that are, by themselves, "unbelievable"...well, hey, it makes for good entertainment on a slow work day!

Ok, so you live in the south east.

Ok, so you've got passive solar. great.

but you said that you made "mods"....what else did you do to the house?

Lance1 said:

The sun is a powerful energy source, it's the only reason we are all still alive. When others are heating all day, I'm not because of solar heating, hence low fuel consumption. My highly winterized house is helping as well.

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Actually, you make a really important point here - many people underestimate the true power of passive solar as a heat source. With as many south-facing windows as you have, you are taking advantage of a "Greenhouse effect" that is saving you big $$. The fact of the matter is if you have well insulated windows, you will lose a marginal amount of IR radiation, but still have a lot of solar heat gain.

And it's not just an issue of being in the southern US. I have an acquaintance who added a relative large (nearly entire south side of the house), well insulated greenhouse to her home here in Maine. She lives on nearly 100 acres with few trees to the south. Man, it generates heat - not enough that she doesn't need a heat source (in her case, a woodstove, with a propane heater for backup), but I'm sure she doesn't pay as much fuel costs.

Lance1 said:

Ramble on DAGME, I'm enjoying your information.

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My students would definitely disagree with you here!

Dang it Lance, where 'ya at, man! Ya drivin us nuts! Definitely south of the Mason Dixon...

Actually, I believe you, more than I believe DAG's statement.

FHA is not any more or less efficient than HWBB. Hot water "feels" better because it is more steady, but it isn't necessarily more efficient. There's a lot of dynamics at work in central heating to make a broad generalization like that.

Eric, do you have the Xmas lights up yet? You know it's coming next week!

Burning cordwood in an unmodified pellet stove is not recommended to put it mildly. Could one be modified to make it happen? Well; that would void your warranty.

Pook's analyst is still securing funding for a study of the matter.

Chris

Redox said:

Eric, do you have the Xmas lights up yet? You know it's coming next week!

Chris

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I am hoping for a busy "Black Friday". Or our "Hero" to get this economy rolling. Right!

Eric

Deleted

Poor example. The cast iron wil "feel" better, but the AL pan makes a better HX. You want something that conducts heat for efficiency, and aluminum has better thermal conductivity than cast iron.

Chris

yes...but irrelevant.

This would be like filling 2 different 2-liter bottles with water. one with a large mouth, and one with a small one. tip both bottles upsidedown over the sink. which one empties faster?
which one had more water in it?
which one put more water into the sink?

You're not going to get OUT any more than you put IN.

But as long as we're on the subject...

in your example w/ the different frying pans, which absorb heat at different rates, but they're being fed the same amounts of btu's at the same rate...those that can't flow freely into the pan-where do they go? around the outside of the pan, and up into the room. lost.
For the same reason, there are some systems that use a fluid other than water, because its heat absorbing characteristics more closely match the output of the heat source. This reduces the transfer loss, but it can never eliminate all of it, due to the basic laws of physics.

Redox said:

FHA is not any more or less efficient than HWBB. Hot water "feels" better because it is more steady, but it isn't necessarily more efficient. There's a lot of dynamics at work in central heating to make a broad generalization like that.

Chris

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Agreed. It takes much more energy to heat up a given mass of water than the same mass of air. Since there is more energy in the water, at an equivalent temperature differential it will take longer to release the energy. That makes a hot water system inherently more stable - not more efficient.

Efficiency is how much heat gets into the living space for a unit of fuel. That will be based on losses at the burner (i.e. what heat goes up the stack) and distribution or ducting losses (what is lost to uninhabited spaces). Burner efficiency is not impacted by whether it is an air to air or air to water heat exchanger. The difference in efficiency between FHA and HWBB comes down to losses in the ducting or piping.

Rather than continue to confuse the matter, I deleted the incriminating posts.

Have a happy Thanksgiving all.

Lance is correct about the solar passive heating thing my home has a lot of windows facing the south and when the sun is out we call it a free heat day!