Pellet Stove, Recommendations?

[ragswl4]

Anyone out there have an opinion on a good pellet stove? We are building a new home and have decided to use a pellet stove for heat in the downstairs portion of the house. There appears to be a lot of info on the web about these stoves so its a little hard to pick out the real truth of who's is best. We are leaning towards Harman but as yet not committed. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

PS: House is 2000 sq ft first floor, 850 sq ft second floor.

[Hellrazor]

I like my Harman acentra. One big suggestions since you are in the process of building the house - figure out where you are planing to install the stove and install floor vents for the second floor. The accentra is rated for 1500 though.. so you will have to look at the larger models.

Harman P61 & P61A do 2000+ & the P68 does 2200+

[knotley]

http://hearth.com/

http://hearth.com/

Hundreds of reviews
http://hearth.com/community.html

[Tom Slick]

I have a "Gnome" that can heat one room about as well as a freestanding electric heater. it makes alot of noise for the amount of heat it puts out. I'm sure other makes/models aren't like that.
VERY VERY important, make sure you have a reliable source of pellets! last year there was a shortage of pellets in my area and there were no pellets to be found within 3 hours of my house. If you buy them by the pallet you have to store them somewhere that they won't get soaked with water.
They are effecient, one $5 bag of pellets could heat the house for 2-3 weeks if it were used several hours each day.

The gnome stove was in my house when I bought it. at the time the house was all electric so I know why they installed the pellet stove. I have since had gas installed in the house. If I were to install another stove it would be gas. Less hassle then pellets, constant souce of fuel, and still works very well.

[L. D. Jeffries]

Pellet Stove

For years we heated our home with a wood stove and found it to be great heat but messy, dirty and pretty labor intensive. The older I got the less I wanted to buy or cut wood, stack it in the shed (10-11cords) and then haul it in the house, haul out the ashes and have the flue pipe swept each year ($100 a trip), plus swatting the bugs that were wintering in the wood. This fall had a "LOPI" installed; has a wireless thermostat that you set for whatever temp. you want and forget it. Ash pan only needs to be emptied once a month, but you do need to clean the fly-ash from the burning chamber every couple of days. So far have burned about 3/4 bag of pellets each 24hrs. Bought 3 tons and figured 1 bag per day +-. Only drawback..when the power goes out so does the fire. We have a auto-generator so thats not a problem here. Total bill, stove-3 tons pellets, wireless themostat and installation was about $4000. So far (no real cold weather yet) it seems like it will do the trick. Hope this helps.

[Hellrazor]

Pellet supply is a big deal. I preorder mine in July/August for $180-190 a pallet and pick them up with the F250. Pellet quality is a big issue too. Some burn fast, smoke excessively, etc and some are great. The best I've used so far are Pennwood Premium. But the brands seem to be regional.

The dealers around here usually sell a few brands and they will tell you which they perfer. Also ask their service guys what name brand is better, they know which ones have too much plastic binding on them and make it harder to clean the stove.

On edit.. pallet price is per ton. 50 40# bags.

[ironhat]

Not meaning to be a putz here... I have a wood stove by Quadra-Fire and I only have the chimney cleaned every three years. In each case the sweep has said that there was no creosote and maybe a gallon on fine dirt to clean out. Now, I know that the quality of the wood and the manner in which the stove is burned has a lot to do with this but so does the engineering of the stove itself. The point being that you might want to look into the Quadra-Fires and see if they have a pellet stove that makes sense to you.

Edit: Oh yea, we heat 1800 sp ft with 2.5 to 3 cords per winter.