Do you use just one brand or several?

Being new to this, I have not checked to see what is available locally, brandwise. I see a lot of you have different brands in your sigs, do dealers really stock that many different brands, or do you just buy and stick with the same brand over and over?

I am going to go looking to see what is available but not sure how much diversity I have in my area.

I have 4 tones on the bag on the left and almost 1.5 ton of the bag on the right. The bag on the left is always available from my dealer, got 2 ton at 175 per on friday, not sure if I want to get some more or look around for other brands.

I buy about every brand I see in my area. Just a couple of bags to see how they burn in my beast, and to get a feel for whats out there. What I end up buying depends on price and how they stacked up in my burn/tests. There are deals to be had if you do some homework!

In the end I usually buy a mix of fuels for the season. Some are shoulders(less expensive) and some are the hotstuff(a bit more$) for the cold. But I know many that just load up on the good stuff.

What ever you do, Try not to buy them blindly! Try before you buy JIC.

Can you give me some ideas on the testing I see you do, how do you do measurements like heat output, just run on stove temp for a specified amount of time, and take temp of the air coming out the vents or the surface temp of the stove itself?

Try before you buy as Jay said.... Thats the best advice... Harmans are known to burn just about any pellet with ease. But some are much cleaner and produce more heat without the need to burn as many Lbs as another (less quality) pellet.

As for testing. I dont care much about ash. My Quad ejects it easily, the Furnace auto-cleans, and my CPM has an agitator that will allow to burn almost anything. The heat output, I measure with a Thermocouple. Thats the one I pay attention to the most. I look for the Highest heat pellet, for the lowest cost.

This was my first year and I found 10 diff brands locally. There were some diff in heat and ash. Bought 4 bags at a time so that I was never more than $20 into a bad pellet. I gave me good insight for when I start buying for next year.

You don't really need to get too carried away like I do. Just burning a few bags like jdege did should give you a little insite on how they burn. What you don't want to do is buy a whole ton of unknowns. Only to find they are junk(low heat-high ash ect.) and your stove hates them.

I've tried just about every pellet I can find around me...which isn't a bunch. I've been lucky so far and been able to buy Somersets pretty handily and I've had the best luck with them of any I've burned. Now if the price is right, I'll buy something I've found to be of less quality in my units just to mix in when I burn corn....but they'd have to be awfully cheap!!

I do the same as others, buy different brands I see in my area in small quantities - for testing.
But I have a Harman too, and I like a consistent pellet during the cold season ( I experiment mostly during the shoulder season).
So if I like a pellet that's what I will buy 2-3 tons of for the major portion of the season.

But, I also like to mix pellets. So I will take my La Crete or Okies and mix them with whatever random hardwood pellets I've picked up in the area.

Shtrdave - let us know what you think about the Greene Gold - interested in trying these this year and want to collect some feedback.

Same pellet as the Lowes Greene Teams, Just in a different bag for the dealers. A bit ashy, But excellent heat IMHO.

Greene Team, Gold, Platinum pellets are a good pellet. A little ashy but seem to pack some heat.

Yea - Am looking for a replacement for Lignetics (can't get them this year). Need Hot Hot pellet to replace the Lig Green.

I like to buy a couple different brands for the season. I do not want to run into a bad run and be stuck with 5 tons of bad pellets.

how do you like the greene team? If your stove likes that pellet i wouldn't hesitate buying more, specially at the price you guys down there in PA get.

I have only tried a couple of bags, and the guys above confirm what I thought, they seem to make more ash than the other brand I have but I thought they made more heat output. But being new I figured, what do I know? But my impressions may have been correct according to Subsailor and JT above.

I got 2 tons of the Greene team.....that is my replacement for the Ligs Green letter. Nice burning pellet, although a tad more ash than I'd like, but for the heat, I'll deal with it.

I burned a ton of Clean Burn pellets, they burned real nice and hot and only left a small amount of ash. When I ran low, I went back to the same store and got another ton of the same pellets. The second ton left much more ash build up in the burn pot and didn't seem to burn as hot.

Something happend differently in the middle of their production run.

Dave