Our Company Blog

If you’re tired of hauling and storing wood, consider a pellet insert

Your wood-burning fireplace is an asset to your home. It adds heat, ambiance, and style, and helps keep your heating bills low. But wood-burning fireplaces are a lot of work: Chopping, splitting, hauling, and stacking wood is time consuming, and it takes a lot of space to store the wood you need to warm your home during the winter. If you’re tired of hauling and storing wood, consider a pellet insert.

How pellet inserts work

A pellet insert can be placed inside your existing wood-burning fireplace, along with a stainless steel chimney liner. Pellet stoves burn either wood pellets, made of compressed dehydrated sawdust, or biofuels such as corn, cherry pits, or wheat hulls. The pellets are poured into a storage hopper, and then an auger automatically feeds them into a burn pan. The stove’s fans and vents pull in cooler air to be heated and pump hot air back into your home.

Save yourself storage space

One of the biggest advantages of pellet stoves is that the fuel is readily available and easily stored. Pellets are sold in 40 pound bags at most hardware and many big-box stores. Because they come in 40 pound bags, you can buy bags of pellets as needed. With firewood, you either stack what you need for winter, or you have to buy wood one cord at a time. Pellets can save you from finding somewhere to store all of your firewood. One cord of wood occupies 128 cubic feet of storage space, compared with 80 cubic feet of storage space for one ton of pellets, which provides the equivalent heating power. On average, a home with a wood stove or wood-burning fireplace burns three cords of hardwood each year.

Save yourself from hauling firewood

Of course, wood also comes with the hassle of hauling it back and forth from the woodpile to your house, and adding logs to your fire several times a day. Your firewood needs to be stored a distance from your house to avoid attracting pests to your home. Pellets can be stored in your garage or basement, and because pellets are automatically fed from the storage hopper, pellet stoves don’t need to be tended throughout the day. Depending on your pellet insert, one hopper of pellets can heat a home for up to 24 hours.

Save yourself energy

Another major advantage to pellet stoves is their energy efficiency. Pellet stoves are hailed by green-living enthusiasts as one of the cleanest ways to heat your home. Because the pellets are dehydrated, they produce very little smoke when burned, and almost all of the energy from the fire goes back into heating your home. The fuel is considered carbon neutral because the wood or bio-pellets would have released the same carbon into the air during natural composition. And, of course, whether you’re burning wood or biofuel, your pellets are made from a renewable resource.

If you’re interested in freeing yourself from the headache of chopping, hauling, and storing firewood, call the experts at Beach Stove and Fireplace. We can tell you everything you need to know about upgrading to a pellet insert!

Weekly Maintenance for Pellet Stoves

So you have decided on a wood pellet stove to warm your home. This is a great idea for a multitude of reasons, but making sure to give your new stove a weekly cleaning will allow it to run smoothly and limit the amount of problems that might come up.

Why are pellet stoves so special?

There is an obvious reason that they are gaining in popularity: they have a great reputation of saving energy and money for their owners. The combination of the traditional wood-burning stove  and the technology to keep you running back and forth to the woodpile, results in a stove that runs off of compressed sawdust and other materials. Not only affordable, the pellets are also putting to use sawdust that would otherwise be disposed of. Not only does it use recycled wood waste materials, the stove itself uses a very particular ratio of fuel to air, which allows for a clean, steady burn that doesn’t emit a lot of smoke and creosote into your chimney.

What maintenance is needed for the pellet stove?

New Stove:

Pellet stoves are incredibly low-maintenance, but nonetheless need to be kept on a regular cleaning schedule, much like the rest of your home! Unless you are skilled enough to install the stove yourself, hiring a professional to install it may cut down any problems down the road. Once installed, check the stove, and especially the hopper (where the pellets are held) for any foreign objects that might cause the stove to not run properly. Understanding how the stove works will limit issues later on.

For the Cooler Weather:

Now that fall is quickly coming upon us, it is time to catch up on that cleaning schedule. Thoroughly clearing your stove and chimney of debris and old pellets should be done before you light up for the cooler weather. Make sure to give us a call here at Beach Stove and Fireplace to come give your chimney a sweeping and inspection, as well as looking at your pellet stove to make sure it’s running efficiently.

Weekly Maintenance:

Besides just paying attention to how the stove sounds and operates for any signs of problems, a weekly cleaning takes only a few minutes of vacuuming up ash and scrubbing to keep your stove looking pristine. Take out as much of the ash as possible and wipe down inside surfaces. The glass on your stove can be cleaned using a glass cleaner, and any buildup on the glass can typically be removed with steel wool.

With the upcoming cold season approaching us, it is important to keep your pellet stove clean and functioning. Not only is having a pellet stove efficient, but also it will save you time and money to take care of it. If you are interested in one of our custom pellet stoves, have questions about maintenance, or need to schedule your seasonal chimney sweeping and inspection, don’t hesitate to call!