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Stoves That Burn Chips, Corn & Wood

Any type of fuel-burning stove can burn wood chips, corn and wood, but not all stoves will burn these materials efficiently. A typical wood stove, designed for burning solid sections of wood at high temperatures, will quickly consume smaller organic material and produce very little heat for the effort. A pellet stove, designed specifically for burning biomass matter such as wood chips and corn kernels, burns fuel at a higher combustion and much more efficiently than the traditional wood stove. So, while any stove will consume chips, corn and wood material, pellet stoves do so while producing consistent heat at a lower cost than other stoves. Does this Spark an idea?

  1. The Pellet Stove

    • Humans have burned discarded organic material for centuries as a source of instant heat, but the modern pellet stove was developed as a central heating device in the late 1970s. At that time, fossil fuels had become exponentially expensive, and developers sought more efficient and less costly means to heat homes during the winter seasons. The pellet stove is specially designed to consume small, compressed or dried organic materials, specifically waste products from the agriculture and forestry industries. At a time when fossil fuels and forest products are prohibitively expensive, pellet stoves offer a more economical and efficient means to heat a home.

    How It Works

    • Many pellet stoves resemble the traditional wood stove with their metal housing and boxy shape. The similarities end there, however. In addition to improved efficiency, the pellet stove consumes extraneous biomass materials, such as discarded wood chips, sawdust, bark, dried corn kernels and other combustible waste material. Often the material has been compressed into small cylindrical shapes called pellets. Unlike the wood stove, the pellet stove requires electricity to operate the hopper, the mechanism that automatically feeds the pellets into the stove oven. Some pellet stoves are equipped with blowers that vent heated air into the living space and exhaust carbon monoxide and other by-products outside.

    Efficiency

    • Comparatively, a pellet stove is generally more expensive than a wood stove. Pellet stove savings are found with fuel costs. The Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources considers pellet-stove biomass materials to cost between 25 to 50 percent less than fossil fuels, on average. The U.S. Department of Energy states that pellet stoves are the cleanest of all solid fuel-burning stoves, with nearly 85 percent combustion efficiency levels and extremely low pollution content. Based on a 2007 study by the Pellet Fuels Institute, 800,000 Americans use wood pellet stoves or furnaces to heat their homes.

    Disadvantages

    • Stoves that burn biomass materials do have some drawbacks, however. Since pellet stoves require electricity to operate the feed mechanism, this requirement increases energy costs and also renders the heating device nonoperational during a power outage, an unfortunate situation for homeowners relying on pellet stoves as their main source of heat during cold winters. While there are some pellet stoves that will burn raw, unprocessed biomass materials, most pellet stoves require the manufactured, compressed pellets for proper operation. In 2005, pellet-stove owners were faced with a pellet shortage due to a sudden spark of interest in the stoves and a high demand for pellets that left manufacturers unprepared). Homeowners are largely dependent on the market price of pellets, and they rely heavily on the availability and affordability of the fuel.

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