Pellet and Wood Stoves Guide

When energy prices were really high a few years ago, many people switched to wood and pellet stoves. Some even say they are carbon neutral. But are they really?

What are Pellet and Wood Stoves?

Stoves, sometimes inside the home and sometimes out, sometimes automated and sometimes manual.

Pellet stoves burn little pellets that look like rabbit feed, made from waste products like paper, crop waste, wood chips and sawdust. The pellets are loaded into a hopper and fed by a screw mechanism into the stove. They are the cleanest of solid fuel burners.

Wood stoves can be relatively clean burning if you have a new EPA certified unit with a catalytic combustor that lets the gases burn at lower temperatures, reducing emissions significantly.

Corn stoves burn dried corn kernels and operate much like pellet stoves.

Why we like it

All are burning renewable, local resources. People living in rural areas have good access. It is claimed that burning wood and wood products is carbon neutral, as the CO2 released during combustion was stored when the tree was growing, would be released anyways if the tree died a natural death and rotted, and will be stored again when a replacement tree is planted.

"We regard biomass as carbon neutral," says Dave Reay an environmental scientist at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the book Climate Change Begins at Home, quoted in the Guardian. "Trees take in carbon dioxide, which is released again when they die and rot down. This process has a cycle of around 100 years."

What we worry about

From wood stoves, pollution. Even the cleanest EPA certified stoves still put out a lot of particulates and noxious gases. Many urban areas ban them altogether.

From pellet stoves, availability. They are made from waste materials and when the economy is lousy, there are fewer of these around to make them with. Costs have been varying wildly over the last few years.

Corn stoves are burning food. It is bad enough that America was making ethanol with corn, but to burn it as fuel cannot be considered green.

Eco-factor of Pellet and Wood Stoves

It is estimated that it takes 63 acres of land to provide renewable fuel for one house, with a thirty year cycle of chopping and replanting. Multiply that by the number of houses and you quickly see that it will take a great deal of land to keep our houses warm sustainably.

And what about getting that wood to your home? What is powering the saws and the trucks? Really, the only way one could start to call wood burning carbon neutral is if you lived in the middle of a 63 acre forest and chopped it yourself.

It will also take thirty years to re-sequester the CO2 burned in your stove in one evening. Who is going to ensure that this is done? It is out there, doing the damage now.

With pellet stoves, Collin noted in Pellet Stoves vs. Wood Stoves: Which is Greener?:

"Shipping one ton of pellets about 600 miles uses as much energy as the pellets themselves contain; go much further than that, and you're using more energy to ship than you'll get from burning them."

Cost of Pellet and Wood Stoves

Pellet and corn stoves start at about $ 1500; fancy European ones cost ten times that.

More on Pellet Stoves:
Pellet Stove Buy Guide
Let's Talk About Pellet Stoves
TreeHugger Picks: Pellet Stoves
Wood Pellet Stoves Are Hot
Pellet Stoves Are Still Hot

More on Wood Stoves:
EPA Wood Stove Changeout Campaign
Pellet Stoves vs. Wood Stoves, Which is Greener?