Generally, speaking, how long does 1 bag of pellets last? Let's say your starting up cold and throw in one bag. How long before it stops warming the area?
Question for Pellet Burners
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St_Earl
Minister of Fire
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/poll-how-many-bags-do-you-burn-on-the-coldest-days.121035/
lots of answers in that thread.
i had to look that up to remember my answer - 1 1/8 bags in 12 hours running on high with the feed gate closed as far as it goes.
that's on the coldest days/nights. like below zero cold.
warmer days i'm sure i could get to a bag a day or less. but that's running on the t-stat.
early spring or fall it's much less. sometimes only running at night.
lots of answers in that thread.
i had to look that up to remember my answer - 1 1/8 bags in 12 hours running on high with the feed gate closed as far as it goes.
that's on the coldest days/nights. like below zero cold.
warmer days i'm sure i could get to a bag a day or less. but that's running on the t-stat.
early spring or fall it's much less. sometimes only running at night.
8000 or so btus per pound. Depends on how many pounds per hour you burn. 5 pounds per hour would give you 10 hours. Depends on the stove and settings.
alternativeheat
Minister of Fire
you can't get a handle on this without getting into stove sizes and brands, area to heat and time of year . That said, with the low teen nights and single digit night and daytime under 30ish my Harman P61 is averaging 2-2.5 bags in 24 hours heating 1800 sq ft to an average 73 deg. Basically thus far the overall aver use of pellets is 2 bags per day. But the pellet brand matters too.
Well, it depends mostly on how cold it is outside and how warm you'd like it to be inside.
However, if you just want to know how long a bag can last, just look at your stove's rating. An average stove is rated for between 10k btu to about 45k btu. Divide those numbers by 8k btu, the average pellet rating, and you get the number of pounds you can burn in an hour. So, the above works out to about 1.25 lbs/hr to 5.625 lbs/hr. A bag has 40 lbs. Divide your rate into the number of pounds and you get 32 hrs to just over 7 hrs.
So, your avg stove can burn from 7 hrs to 32 hrs on a single bag of pellets; however, most people don't run their stoves on max or min, it's usually somewhere in between.
Most people burn 1.5 to 2 bags a day on a typical winter day, so a single bag would get most between 12 to 18 hrs.
If you burn a single bag a day (40 pounds) times 8,200 btu per pound that will be 328,000 btu. Now divide that by a 24 hr day and you can say you burn 13,666 input btu per hour. You are only using a fraction of that 50,000 btu stove. to open that stove all the way up you will need over 6 pounds of pellets per hour, minus what goes out the exhaust.
Eric
Eric
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