How to Heat a Home With Corn

By eHow Home & Garden Editor

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In recent years, there has been a revival of a heating method that is efficient, clean and cost-effective. Heating your home with a renewable home-grown source of fuel such as corn is not only a good choice for you but also a good choice for our country's economy. To heat your home with corn, you will need a wood pellet or corn stove.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Wood pellet or corn stove
Feed corn
Silo or storage place for bagged corn

Step1

Purchase and install a wood pellet stove if you do not already have one. If you have a wood pellet stove, you may not have known that you can also burn corn instead of wood pellets.

Step2

Build a silo to hold bulk corn if you wish to purchase it that way. It is also available in 50-pound bags sold by the ton. However, since corn is still not widely used in home heating, there are not distributors of bagged corn in all areas. Depending on where you live, you might have no choice but to buy it in bulk.

Step3

Check with local feed and grain stores to see if any of them are bagging the corn for home heating purposes. If they are not yet bagging, make the suggestion to them that they do so.

Step4

Compare prices from several different feed and grain stores, especially if you will be buying in bulk. All feed and grain stores most likely have access to feed corn that cannot be sold as animal feed because it is scorched, is the wrong-size kernels or has mildewed. If they are not bagging the corn and selling it for heating purposes, they probably consider it a waste product and will give you a great deal on it.

Step5

Fill the hopper of your wood pellet stove with corn.

Step6

Light a fire in the stove. It is hard to get a fire lit using corn. You probably will want to purchase a couple of bags of wood pellets and use them to get the fire started. Once it is started, the corn will burn to keep the fire going.

Step7

Set the auger on the stove to distribute the corn to the fire depending on how hot a fire you want. Most stoves have low, medium and high auger settings.

Tips & Warnings

Some wood pellet stoves do better burning corn than others. Additionally, some corn will burn better than other corn. If you are having trouble keeping the fire going when burning corn, you might want to mix some wood pellets into the hopper with the corn.