To get your thread back on track...........A better quality of pellets may help with the ash...but it doesn’t seem terrible. As far as the cold bedrooms......that’s just the way it is. A pellet stove is a space heater. If you want even temps throughout the house......you want central heating...ie ducted furnace. A couple we’ll places fans may help.
You can do like I do (if you have a forced air central furnace), run the blower only 15 minutes every hour to distribute the heat throughout the hose but be apprised that your pellet consumption will go up appreciably. Remember, unlike a central heat plant that inputs around 100,000 btu or better, your pellet stove is only capable of about 50,000 BTU running at max and clean inside as the ash produced by burning pellets or corn, coats the interior of the unit and lowers the heat transfer rate. The coating of ash is a good insulator inside.
What I like to do is run the central heat plant and bio-mass stove together and let the central heat plant cycle on and off as needed. My bio-mass stove is on a remote thermostat that is located next to the thermostat for the central furnace so I can easily monitor the temps on both.
At night, I have the central heat plant dialed back to 55 and I let the bio-mass stove assume the entire load when we are asleep, snuggled under the electric blanket. 7AM the central heat plant comes back up to a pre set 68 degrees and warms the place back up. I keep my bio-mass stove at 70 on the thermostat all the time.
Last couple years with the low cost of propane (we heat with it), I didn't even bother running the stove at all. It wasn't economically prudent to run it with pellets (here) at 250 a ton and propane at a dollar a gallon but, the price of pellets here dropped to $200 a ton and I tapped into a free source of corn so now I'm back burning even though propane is still pretty cheap at $1.10 a gallon.
I penciled out the difference per effective BTU and came up with, so long as propane is under $1.20 a gallon and pellets are 250 a ton, it's more prudent to run propane. With the 200 a ton price, it's almost a break even scenario and the wife likes the stove heat anyway so I'm back to roasting bio mass.
Of course, none of that applies with oil heat or hot water baseboard, only forced air. and your mileage may be different.
Some pellets make more ash (and fly ash) than other brands do. I think it depends entirely on the feedstock used to extrude the pellets.
Here, I have good results with Michigan Hardwood pellets (Gaylord, Michigan), but probably not available everywhere. Wood pellets seem to be a regional thing, most likely due to transportation cost. Farther they have to be hauled, more it costs.
Feedstock for Michigan Hardwood is forestry slash and recycled hardwood pallets.
Always keep in mind that the more you clean it out inside (and remove the ash coating), the better it will run and produce more heat per pound of fuel.
