I have an old Enviro EF2, which the marketing materials I find online describe as having "simplistic controls." Boy is that ever true.
As primitive as these stoves are, they can teach you a lot. There is no electronic brain in there to make decisions that you have no part of. That makes it really easy to observe the result of small tweaks you make to the feed rate, damper, or room blower. At some point, I'll upgrade to a smarter stove that's more "plug and play," but I'm glad that I'm starting out with this stove as a learning stove.
So to the point: having run this stove for a month, I can truly vouch for a one"truisms" that repeatedly shows up on this forum: every stove and every pellet brand are different. While you may have a great experience with one pellet, someone else's stove may hate them.
I've tried 4 different brands of pellets over the last month. To get roughly the same performance from each brand I need to adjust the feed rate quite a bit between brands. As follows:
1) Heat'rs from HD: Very consistent pellet size, but they ARE sticky. They stick to the side of the hopper, and to each other. As a result, they seem to run cooler at the same Dial A Fire setting than any other pellet. So, I have to turn up the "volume knob" on the stove, just a bit, to get the same pellet consumption rate.
2) Okanagan Golds: Very consistent size, about the same size as the Heat'rs, but they feed right through with no issue at all. I turn the knob down a bit.
3) Northeast Pellets from TSC: Highly variable pellet size. As a result, over a 5-minute period flame size varies quite a bit. Sometimes only a couple of pellets will drop down the chute for a few cycles, then 20 or so will dump all at once. Despite that, they feed very well in my stove, about the same overall rate as the Okies.
4) Big Heat pellets from TSC: very small, almost perfectly consistent pellet size. Watching these pellets go through the hopper is like watching the toilet flush. I have to turn the feed rate down substantially to avoid roasting the house.
When I picked up the Big Heats, the store manager said "nobody likes these pellets, sure they put out a lot of BTUs but the run through the stove too fast." Well, yeah. They're ball bearings compared to most other pellets.
I realize that most of you already know this sort of thing, but I do see a lot of people asking how to set their auger trim, or other "magic number" settings on their stove. I have to assume that the only right answer, unfortunately, is "it depends." At some point, my old stove will be replaced with a fancier new stove, but I will study the control mechanisms real well before making a choice, and I'll want to be able to have some control over these aspects, controls which are easily understood and observed.
As primitive as these stoves are, they can teach you a lot. There is no electronic brain in there to make decisions that you have no part of. That makes it really easy to observe the result of small tweaks you make to the feed rate, damper, or room blower. At some point, I'll upgrade to a smarter stove that's more "plug and play," but I'm glad that I'm starting out with this stove as a learning stove.
So to the point: having run this stove for a month, I can truly vouch for a one"truisms" that repeatedly shows up on this forum: every stove and every pellet brand are different. While you may have a great experience with one pellet, someone else's stove may hate them.
I've tried 4 different brands of pellets over the last month. To get roughly the same performance from each brand I need to adjust the feed rate quite a bit between brands. As follows:
1) Heat'rs from HD: Very consistent pellet size, but they ARE sticky. They stick to the side of the hopper, and to each other. As a result, they seem to run cooler at the same Dial A Fire setting than any other pellet. So, I have to turn up the "volume knob" on the stove, just a bit, to get the same pellet consumption rate.
2) Okanagan Golds: Very consistent size, about the same size as the Heat'rs, but they feed right through with no issue at all. I turn the knob down a bit.
3) Northeast Pellets from TSC: Highly variable pellet size. As a result, over a 5-minute period flame size varies quite a bit. Sometimes only a couple of pellets will drop down the chute for a few cycles, then 20 or so will dump all at once. Despite that, they feed very well in my stove, about the same overall rate as the Okies.
4) Big Heat pellets from TSC: very small, almost perfectly consistent pellet size. Watching these pellets go through the hopper is like watching the toilet flush. I have to turn the feed rate down substantially to avoid roasting the house.
When I picked up the Big Heats, the store manager said "nobody likes these pellets, sure they put out a lot of BTUs but the run through the stove too fast." Well, yeah. They're ball bearings compared to most other pellets.
I realize that most of you already know this sort of thing, but I do see a lot of people asking how to set their auger trim, or other "magic number" settings on their stove. I have to assume that the only right answer, unfortunately, is "it depends." At some point, my old stove will be replaced with a fancier new stove, but I will study the control mechanisms real well before making a choice, and I'll want to be able to have some control over these aspects, controls which are easily understood and observed.
