Pellet Stoves

Pellet Stoves are the stoves that burn compressed wood or biomass pellets. Burning scrap wood was around for decades, but first pellet stoves were introduced only in 70s during the Oil Crisis. They became very popular and started competing with wood burning and gas stoves. Nowadays, pellet stoves are heating hundred of thousands of houses and workshops around the world.

Pellet stoves usually come in three different designs: stand-alone units, fireplace inserts, and big furnaces used for central heating or for heating large spaces. For inserts you can usually use existing niches of your old fireplaces and existing chimneys for smoke exhaust. With the popularity of pellet stoves steadily growing, more and more companies start manufacturing these heating devices. Some new and some existing old brands are turning their attention to pellet stoves. Some popular brands of pellet stoves that you can find on the Stove Only website are: Bixby, Breckwell, Englander, Whitfield, Harman, Timberridge, and more.

Pellet stoves can also differ by the type of fuel they use, feeding systems, and combustion air controls. Most of the pellet stoves would use normal wood pellets, but many could run on bio-mass products, such as corn or grains (alone or mixed with wood pellets), and even specially produced bio-mass pellets. All pellet stoves use automatic pellet-feeding systems, but it can be either top or bottom fed. Bottom-fed systems are a bit more reliable and less prone to clogging. Combustion air control can be either in-take or blow-out.

All pellet stoves are usually quite complex devices: they normally have automatic ignition, thermal controls, automatic feeding systems, and other advanced features. On one hand, it is very nice as they're providing extra comfort for your house and ease in operation for your pellet stove, but there is a little downside as well. Due to their complexity, pellet stoves will require more maintenance and care than other fuel-type stoves. They also are dependant on electricity for igniting and feeding pellets into a burner, meaning that if there is a power outage, you won't be able to run your pellet stove (or at least run it properly).

There're quite a few benefits in using pellets stoves. First, environment is getting more and more important these days and pellets stoves are much cleaner than wood burning or coal stoves. They also use recycled materials and some pellets are made of different kinds of bio-waste. Many pellet stoves can run not only on wood pellets, but on different kinds of bio-mass fuels, like corn or grains, which is renewable and very environment-friendly. Another advantage of pellet stoves is their efficiency: they're producing about 80% of heat output, which is comparable with gas and fuel oil stoves. The running costs on the other hand are may not be cheapest (comparing to wood or coal stoves), but very comparable to gas or electricity. All in all, if you're looking for environment-friendly, cost-effective, and easy to maintain way of heating your house, pellet stoves can easily live up to your expectations.

You can see current listings for Pellet Stoves below: