anyone use a woodburing stove?

[MrBond]

Originally posted by: edprush
Why can't a wood burning stove burn corn efficiently/safely? I'm sorry but I don't know how a corn stove is built.

You can burn corn in a regular wood stove, my parents burnt a combination of corn and wood for several years in the old woodburning stove. It cut the wood use to about half.

Dad would get a good fire going, then toss the corn in on top of it. He'd keep feeding the corn as the day went on. He fed it manually and would add wood as well.

It worked, but it was really only to use the wood we had left over before switching to a pure corn stove. The corn was nice because it ment they only had to bring wood up to the house once a week instead of 2-3 times (we stored the firewood in a barn probably 50 yards from the house, then brought what we needed up to the house).

The corn stove they have now is started with a mixture of wood fire starter pellets and corn, once that is burning the feed kicks on and starts dropping corn into the fire pot, which is actually pretty small, maybe 8x8". Blowers blow air through the bottom of the fire pot (so you have to clean out the "puck" of unburned corn about once a day) to help combustion and different blowers blow the warm air into the room.

Edit: Yeah, you use shelled corn. It works out really well for my Dad, since he takes the last corn we have in the fields and dumps it right into his grain truck. We use 5 gallon buckets to bring the corn to the patio. We've got about 30 buckets (enough for two weeks of use) on the porch now.

You can burn whole ear corn - we were talking to my Great Uncle yesterday and he said in years when ear-corn wasn't worth selling, they'd often burn it along with wood in the stove.

 

[ZippyDan]

to help combustion and different blowers blow the warm air into the room.

dont you mean cornbustion? 😀

 

[NogginBoink]

Originally posted by: MrBond

Originally posted by: DrPizza
Check to see if you have coal available in your area.
Around here, it's $200 per ton for bagged coal. ($170 for bulk)

I haven't been by the grain elevator to check the current price of corn, but I'd estimate it's ~$1.50 per bushel. A bushel of corn is about 56 pounds if I'm thinking correctly, so there's about 36 bushels per ton. That works out to about $55 per ton of corn.

The price of corn is pretty low - I was talking to my great uncle yesterday and he said the farmer that rents his fields and farms them now had 160 bushels of corn per acre (that's REALLY good yields) and he barely made money on the land after the expenses of growing it.

Dollars per ton is the wrong metric to look at. You want to look at dollars per BTU.

 

[edprush]

Do BTUs translate directly into square footage heating capability?

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: edprush
Do BTUs translate directly into square footage heating capability?

No - you do a heat loss analysis, which takes into account the size & R value of your exterior walls, ceilings, windows, etc. This will give you BTU/hour loss for a given temperature difference (maybe 70 inside/15 outside). This is the amount of BTU/hr that you have to supply to maintain that temperature.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Originally posted by: yellowfiero

So I assume you need a special coal burning furnace, or can a wood burner work with coal? How do you get your coal? Is it delivered? I don't know if coal is available here in Michigan..

Yes, the stove we have feeds the coal (we use rice coal) via an auger. The area that's actually burning is only about 4 inches by 1 inch and 3/4 inch thick. I could get the coal delivered to me; there are at least 3 places within 25 miles of me that sell it; one sells both in bulk and by the bag. I prefer bags over bulk and am willing to pay the extra $30 a ton more. (170 vs 200) I considered getting it delivered, but it's just as easy to purchase it then bring 1/2 ton to my house at a time.

Sampson said something about coal being messy?? I used wood heat throughout my childhood. Wood is FAR more messy and requires far more space than coal. Here's my basic routine: every night before I go to bed, I check to see if I need to add more coal. I walk out to the garage where I have it stored, pick up a sealed 40 pound bag, carry it to the dining room (where I have the coal stove), remove the cover from the hopper, slice the bag open with a knife that I keep by the stove, pour in the contents, cover the hopper, throw the bag out. That's it. It's as messy as it would be to dump a 40 pound bag of dogfood into a big hopper - no mess at all. NO dust. None. Nada. The coal is dampened with something to eliminate any airborne dust particles. I've taken handfuls of coal out to show friends. Sometimes my hands get a little dirty; most times my hands stay clean.

Finally: advice to those who burn wood and have wood freely available to them:
Cut the wood, split the wood, sell the wood. Take the money and buy coal or corn. You'll come out ahead.

And that bonus burning coal smell downwind 😛
Also note that some chimneys aren't meant for coal burners - if you've got a masonery chimney I think you're OK but I'm pretty sure when I installed my triple wall metal chimney that coal fires are verboten.

 

[spaceman]

coal FTW
wood pellets wet? shot

 

[DeadByDawn]

I just had a new wood stove installed this weekend. Propane prices got high enough that it just made sense. I got a smaller unit, but my goal is just to knock 50% off my heating costs per year. I can get as much free firewood as I want to cut. I love it already. I bought a Jotul.

 

[edprush]

Originally posted by: DeadByDawn
I just had a new wood stove installed this weekend. Propane prices got high enough that it just made sense. I got a smaller unit, but my goal is just to knock 50% off my heating costs per year. I can get as much free firewood as I want to cut. I love it already. I bought a Jotul.

Where did you buy it?
cost???????

 

[DeadByDawn]

I bought it locally through a dealer, it was about $1650. Expensive, but we were installing it in our dining room so in order to get wife approval I had to get an antique-ish looking stove, its got the white porcelain finish. I built my own pedestal, and saved a couple hundred there. Then I know an installer, who installed it for me and gave me a great deal on the chimney. After taxes and everything it was ~ $2300. You can go a lot cheaper than that though, we bought a really expensive stove. If propane prices stay where they are now, and I reduce my heating costs by 50%, I'm looking at a 3 year payoff.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
Check to see if you have coal available in your area.
Around here, it's $200 per ton for bagged coal. ($170 for bulk)

Compare that to the cost per ton for corn, or for wood pellets. The advantage is that you don't have to fuss with storage. You don't want wood pellets to get wet. I'm not certain about corn storage. Even if the coal is soaking wet, it's not a problem. (Lighting it initially can be a pita sometimes)

As far as heat goes,
coal around 13,000 btu's per pound
wood pellets around 7,000 btu's per pound
firewood around 4000 btu's per pound
corn ??


I heat exclusively with coal. The last few days when it was in the teens and 20's, I went through a little less than 50 pounds a day. I kept the living room and dining room of the house heated to 75+ degrees, the bedrooms slightly cooler (they're farther away from the stove; I could have used a small fan for more air circulation, but I prefer the bedrooms to be cooler for sleeping.) I expect to average a ton a month from now to March; so it'll cost me about 200 a month for heat. This is significantly cheaper than any other readily available source of heating. The ceilings of my house are virtually uninsulated (1 1/2 inches of fiberglass). I expect my coal usage to drop significantly (to about 1/2 the current level) after I insulate.

FYI - Home Depot has a nice rebate on fiberglass insulation right now: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=40&threadid=1745620&enterthread=y

I'm in Western NY; not the coldest area of the country, but still cold enough. (if you look at the climate maps, I'm in that little bubble of colder temperatures than the rest of the area, extremes to about 20 below.) In my last house, our gas bills were $400+ per month to keep the house at 65. I like this much better.

Other advantages of coal: clean burning - NO creosote. There's some fly ash that has to be vacuumed out of the vent pipe once or twice a year. Chimney stays very clean though. Also, the coal is treated to eliminate dust, so that's not a problem in the house.

 

[randomlinh]

i didn't even know the existance of corn burning stoves. my friend's parents have a woodburning stove. Really nice in the winter (altho it gets kinda warm where the stove is.. heh). But like someone pointed out.. need perfectly dry wood.. it's a pain. They however have a huge supply of it free because a family member took out a huge ~3ft diameter tree out of their property...