Dumb questions from New Pellet Stove Owner

There is never a stupid question when it relates to running a pellet stove.

I can answer your first question only. Yes, it is normal to have a "LITTLE" wood burning smell when just starting the pellet stove. I have a Quadra Fire, and it puts off a wood stove smell for a few minutes. It isn't very strong, and seems to dissapte after it warms up.

I am not familiar with your make/model stove, but you should make certain that you have no exhaust leaks. Seal all joints.

As far as your basement install and the amount of heat you are experiencing, you should search the forum for the words "basement install". You will find many opinions and experiences with basement installs. I think that most will agree (even those who have successful basement installs, that your losing most of your heat if the basement is unfinished. Concrete floors and walls will absorb your heat. It sounds as though by the square footage you are already pushing the capabilities of what your stove can handle, but you seem aware of that. Your problem is that the basement is unfinshed.

jesmitch said:

I have searched through the forums and didn’t find my exact problem and answer but please forgive me if it has already been answered somewhere. I recently purchase a 1.5 year old New Englander 25-PDVC and just got it installed. I had it professionaly installed, but didn’t use an outside air intake as it states I should. I will be doing this myself shortly. I have two minor issues that I would like help with.

1. Whenever I go into the basement, it smells sort of like I am burning a wood burning stove. I might be mistaken, but I was under the assumption that the pellets should be somewhat odorless. Please let me know if I am wrong on this, or what I could do to see about getting it corrected.

2. I have had the stove running on low for 5 hours today. The basement warmed a couple of degrees, but it doesn’t seem like it is making much difference. The stove is rated for 1500 square feet and my basement is 1600. I realize it can’t be my only source of heat, but with the earth providing such good insulation for the concrete walls and floor, I was expecting the stove to be able to heat the basement at the very least. Could part of this be because of the outside air intake not being hooked up? I have a new home that is fairly airtight so drafts are not the problem.

Thank you all in advance for your help.

Click to expand...

1. There is always a very slight wood burning smell. I noticed it right away after the pellet stove is installed. No smoke but a definite smell. When I open the door to scrap the burn pot I also come out smelling like wood smoke and the room smells like it for hours. I hardly notice it anymore and I have severe allergies.

2. Yes the basement is insulated by its earthen surroundings to about 55-60 degrees but concrete, cement blocks and poured cement have a lot of thermal mass to try and heat up. The floor will be about the same temp as the earth. Stone is even worse.

Castle aren't just cold because of poor heating systems. Stone is hard to heat up and so is concrete.

Try putting the stove up on high until the basement heats up and then back it down. As far as the wood burning smell, try sealing every joint in the exaust vent with high temperature, black RTV from the auto parts store. It might help.

Mark

It's very difficult to heat an unfinished basement... the heat loss thru the walls is very difficult to over come.

Back in the 70's I heated my 2200 sq. ft. home with an inexpensive wood heater. It was an open floor plan with 16' ceilings and two bedrooms and one bath upstairs on the balcony.

After two years I bought a new, higher btu fabricated steel woodburner for the first floor and moved the "wood heater" downstairs to heat my basement. When the "heater" was upstairs I could get the house up to 90 degrees with no problems. After I installed it in the basement I would be lucky to see 55 degrees.

I had a local dealer come over and he explained how difficult it is to heat an unfinished basement. The stove was useless in the basement.

Good luck.

jesmitch said:

I will mention that I can get the basement up to 63F from 58F, so it is working, I was just hoping to see a bigger difference. In your opinion, after burning it for 9 hours, will this be about as good as I am going to get?

Click to expand...

What settings are you burning at....feed rate and blower speed?

Those concrete walls and floors must be acting as a major "Heatsink". My pellet stove is the smallest one that Quadra-Fire makes "Castille", and it heats my finished 1100 sq.ft basement up real nice.

I have a regular heat duct down there, but I always keep it closed in the winter. My coldest temps seem to go as low as 58* . At 58*, my stove will have it up to 76* + within an hour and a half, easily...

Get it studded up, put good insulation in there, and get some sheetrock or paneling on those walls. Next, get the thickest, highest quality mold resistent carpet pad you can find, and finally get some carpet in there.

Things will warm up then.

jesmitch said:

I think this will be my next move. It will make my wife happy too.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but tell her it's your man-cave, and she needs permission to enter after your finished

Good luck, and keep us posted on the construction progress.

Bucktail

Hi Jesmitch,

I have an englander stove same as yours installed in the basement, it is only a half basement and the house is a 1 1/2 story about 1300 sqft.
I ran mine on 1 or 2 over 4 months here in Virginia went through 2 tons of pellets but used no oil only on the coldest of nights and mornings just to help. What everyone is saying is true, your basement is sucking up your heat, although eventually things will warm up it is just not as comfortable as you will mostly like. We plan to move ours upstairs (1 st floor) for next winter if pellets come down in price. The wife did not want the stove in the living room thinking it would be very hot in one room and colder in others, well what can you do. Now she wants it in that room.
I was going to do the same thing with our basement finishing the walls to help with the heat sink, but it is cheaper to put the stove where you really need it. I feel the 2 tons of pellets would have done better upstairs and I would probably have not ran out. But still If I had burned oil I would have spent way more in $$$
Good luck with whichever way you go just thought I would share our first years experience with you

1. If you are smelling smoke while the stove is running, you may have leak in your vent connections
somewhere. There should be no odor.

2. As the others have mentioned, if your basement is unfinished, the walls are sucking up all your heat.
Get the basement walls and floors insulated and you will see a huge difference in what your stove can do.

BTW- welcome to the forum!

jesmitch said:

I think she knows that is a given!

Click to expand...

Yup, sure, she does.

Being a bear (natural caving instincts) and supposedly been given the basement room as an office/den only to discover that the cat, grand child, and just about anyone who comes over, and the wife all seem to have a lot of their junk in "my" room.

You have been warned ;-) .

That haven been said, perhaps you could provide a bit more information about your installation?

Except when you open the door on your unit and actually let a bit of smoke into the room I wouldn't expect a wood smoke smell and that should diminish rather quickly. Which brings up the old if it does remain it is time as codebum says to go exhaust system leak hunting, other signs to watch out for are persistent burning eyes when in the room. The best advice in general is to have a CO detector as well as a smoke detector (both varieties of smoke detector in fact).

I have a basement install and it does a real good job of heating, however it is not in an unfinished basement. Pellet stoves are what you would call slow heaters, don't ever expect to quickly gain ground temperature wise unless the stove can produce serious heat.

Good luck on your cave project.

jesmitch said:

I am sure my wife and kids will take over the basement when it it done too!

No visible smoke, and I bought an expensive digital CO detector and there is no CO detected at all. I also have a smoke detector system that alerts every room in the house in case of fire. I've noticed that the longer it runs, the warmer it gets. It will just take quite a while to get the concrete heated. Probably a losing battle until I get the walls insulated.

Click to expand...

I


I think you'll need to put in more time(weeks) and try some things before you start to worry and calculate how many pellets you are going to go through.

I don't know much about your stoves besides reading about the reviews of them and skimming through the manual when I was thinking about buying one.

Is there a draft control on it? Could you put more air in for a more efficient and hotter burn? While your waiting to finish the basement.

Mark

My Englander 25-PDVC is installed in our living room. I have a cape and my settings are at 5-5-1 bottom buttons and 1-2 top buttons and seem to get the best burn with moderate temps between 40-20*. Once it goes below 20* I turn it up to 2-3 or 3-4 top buttons. If it gets down to single digit temps I change to 6-6-1 bottom buttons and 4-5, 5-6. 6-7 top buttons just to maintain 70-75* inside. Once it's below 0* (a couple of times this winter) I have gone as high as 8-9 (-22* outside) top buttons (with 6-6-1 bottom buttons) and was able to maintain at least 68-70* in the stove room. If you figure in windy conditions, it's a whole new ball game. Hope this helps.

jesmitch said:

I have searched through the forums and didn’t find my exact problem and answer but please forgive me if it has already been answered somewhere. I recently purchase a 1.5 year old New Englander 25-PDVC and just got it installed. I had it professionaly installed, but didn’t use an outside air intake as it states I should. I will be doing this myself shortly. I have two minor issues that I would like help with.

1. Whenever I go into the basement, it smells sort of like I am burning a wood burning stove. I might be mistaken, but I was under the assumption that the pellets should be somewhat odorless. Please let me know if I am wrong on this, or what I could do to see about getting it corrected.

2. I have had the stove running on low for 5 hours today. The basement warmed a couple of degrees, but it doesn’t seem like it is making much difference. The stove is rated for 1500 square feet and my basement is 1600. I realize it can’t be my only source of heat, but with the earth providing such good insulation for the concrete walls and floor, I was expecting the stove to be able to heat the basement at the very least. Could part of this be because of the outside air intake not being hooked up? I have a new home that is fairly airtight so drafts are not the problem.

Thank you all in advance for your help.

Click to expand...

yours is a question i get a lot from new stove owners , many with the unit you currently own (BTW welcome to the ESW family) basement installs generally do not yeild the results most expect, especially unfinished ones. as most all before me have stated , basement walls are huge heat sinks, the thermal mass and low r fators of concrete and stone make it hard for a pellet stove to gain ground rapidly. eventually it will catch up but its not going to take hours it will take days. i generally recommend to folks who call before installing and mention the basement , i ask them "do you intend to "live" down there?" as in spend meaningful time, or are you looking for the "heat rising up" effect? heat from basement stoves very seldom rises up as effectively as expected, usually there is only one way up , through the stairwell, and no "return" to allow it a different path down as it cools, so you have a natural log jam of air , as the warm stuff wants to rise it collides with cooler air wanting to decend. a finished basement with insulation on the walls is a much easier prospect to heat simply because the heat sink effect of the concrete is blocked by the insulation and the air inside this area will warm much faster.

as for the smell, you very likely have a minor leak in a pipe fitting , check the bottoom cap of the TEE , they tend to leak a bit sometimes, if so seal up the bottom of the tee cap , not where you twist it off , but between the inner "cup" that collects the ash, and the ouoter shell , looking up through the bottom of the tee cap.

outside air will help overall as well , by running with "house air" you are doing the following .
1 , you are moving air out of the house through the exhaust, this draws cold air in through existing leaks elsewhere making them more pronounced.
2. by doing this you are creating a "negative pressure zone" in the room the stove is located in,especially in a new relatively airtight house, this can lead to smoke release in the event of a power failure or unexpected shutdown of the stove due to failure of component and such. we try to avoid this , smoke in houses is not good for buisness as you might expect.
3. once you have started to create a gain on the temperature , the air you are pulling through the stove out of the room is air you have already paid to heat and you are running it through the stove and dumping it outside

benefits from using an OAK are the removal of the 3 mentioned above , plus, by trapping and heating the air in the house, as it warms ,it creates a mild "positive pressure" as it expands with heat, this pushes against the leaks in the house currently letting in the cold, so the house stays even warmer by minimizing these leaks.

bottom line , there is no drawback from using an OAK