newbie pellet question

[esuitt]

I am sure this have been covered over and over again.
But why do the same pellets from the same skid/ batch burn different?

Like my Ligs I have been getting. Sometimes I can get 16 hours out of a bag and other times 12 hours. Then sometimes it will be 72 and other times 80* in the house. I understand the temp difference could be outside temp effecting the house. That has been discussed many times also.
But like now, it is 11 pm my house is 79 and my oven has been off for over 8 hours from cooking the ham today. Usually by now, my house would be about 74.
I am not making any adjustments to the stove, once it is one it is set to burn.

To give an example, I know if I have a full hopper (not 40lbs) usually goes for 12 hours or more (sometimes). The other night, the hopper was half full and I had a partial bag sitting on the floor so I added it when we went to bed at 11, that gave me around 3/4 hopper. Got up 7 hours later at 6 am and the stove was off, ran out of pellets.

Just being inquisitive and not much worried about the temp difference as I am about burn rate.

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

I'll repeat this one last time.

The feed on a pellet stove is not by weight it is by volume and that means that everything about the physical make up of the pellet comes into play. Since pellets are not all the same size you'll not get the same weight of fuel every cycle of the auger.

The end result is what you see as varying burn times and temperature differences.

The better pellets are more consistent in their physical makeup and thus tend to provide a more consistent burn.

 

[imacman]

Well, let's say for the sake of argument that the hopper holds 35 lbs. If it burned for 12 hrs., that indicates an approx. burn rate of 3 Lbs/hr.

If the hopper the other night was approx. 3/4 full, that means it had approx. 26 lbs in it. At 3 lbs/hr you should have gotten approx 8 hrs.

Since all these figures are very approximate, I'd say that the 7 hr figure isn't too far off from the full hopper rate.