Here’s the pellet stove that provides nearly all of the heat for our home. It uses pellets made from the sawdust byproduct of lumber mills in Oregon. This stove is wired to a programmable thermostat that shuts it off around 8pm and starts it back up around 3am – so we wake up to a cozy house.
We like it cold in the bedrooms at night and warm in the living area in the day. This stove does the trick. Use of a Vornado fan can circulate warm air to hard to reach areas of your home if you don’t have the great-room concept like we do.
We have a barrel next to the stove that we fill once per week – and we fill the stove roughly once per day (just grab the scoop and fill it up). The pellets cost around $275/ton and we go through 2 to 2.5 tons per winter. It’s a good lesson for the kids to see how much fuel it takes to heat a home.
But doesn’t the stove emit CO2? Yes it does. This is an important question. It emits CO2 that is already in the carbon cycle. Trees capture CO2 as they grow – then it is released when they burn. The carbon is not being dug up from under the earth’s surface and placed into the atmosphere. If the lumber is sustainably harvested, using pellets to heat your home should dramatically lower the amount of carbon that your family is adding to the carbon cycle.
Let's Fix This Planet 