Pellet heads!! What's up today?

Decided to shoot a little video..

dammed YOU TUBE APP would not work....FINALLY REBOOTED MY IPHONE.

More gooder


TV is in the back ground.
The wind noise is the air blowing out the heat vents

If you watch just to the left of the large flame you can see the shell pieces slide out the chute into the fire....About every 4 seconds it drops some shells

Currently at 185F
Cozy warm

 

Nice. Fixed a friends Whit., smoky flames,even went out once. A Profile 30. Only runs at night,always on low,never on med or high. Since it was new. He is good about cleaning it, even upwards inside the access panels. Had a idea, so took a exhaust blower gasket along. Yep,has never been out. And, looked in his paper manual that came with stove says nothing about cleaning it!. He never gets on the net,a bit of a luddite carpenter. Made him pull the motor, so he would learn,and the motor was completely clogged in the cooling holes. Well,it was the most build up on any combustion blower I have ever seen,or even seen pictures of. Didn't have phone and didn't think to take a picture. The impeller blades were over 1/2 covered,up and across,thickly. 1/2" thick in the center of the "mounds". Surprised the stove ran. Well only been a few days, but he says still purring along nicely, with nice low flame. Makes me wonder how many people forget to clean it,at least once a year. Oh,yes,I took up him one of the reusable silicone gaskets, and now he knows how easy it is. I do like the Profile 30 stoves,I would own one.

 

Sorry to read about the hand G, that sucks. Feeling your pain after 3+ hrs. yesterday sn*wblowing a path out back to the basement entry / cleaning 14" of drifted white chit off the back deck, my back and knee are 'singing' today.

Tip: some empty pellet bags, each filled 1/4 full are about 30 lbs. I'd fill & load 10 of those over 3-4 pails if needed, much easier to load in & out of the vehicle.

 

We have a Prodigy 2 in the living room and the Advantage 2T in the family room.
The house is an open floor plan.

The stoves look at one another diagonally down the length of the house

Some pix of the house.
Looking diagonally end to end.
The air flow is a no brainer across the house.
During warmer weather the P2 back in the West corner with the Gray wall treatment (My avatar shows the P2) will heat the entire house
Standing by the Adv 2t the P2 can barely be seen in the distance

Standing by the P2 the living room takes off to the left with the Quadrafire 1000 in the far left corner.

The Quad will heat the entire house, but we can heat with the shells for a very small fraction of the cost of the pellets to feed the big Quad.

During power outages we hook up the Quad to the HF gen set....Keeps thing warm even in a snow event.

The other two bedrooms are to the left of the big screen TV in the family room....
total of 2300 sq ft on the main floor.....

So open that getting heat through is simple.
When the P2 can't gitterdone....Shut it off and crank up the Adv 2t
When that does not do it....crank the P2 back up...

If we get to low single digits F we can crank up the Quad.
We have only needed that once in recent years.
The big Whitfield is a pretty good work horse.

With the one small and one large stoves we can mix and match to keep the house comfy....
So we don't have to freeze or sweat our butt off.
We have the Adv 2t running on #2 setting right now with a tiny fire....House is about 73F
Will crank it up to #3 before sack time at 10-11 pm to take care of the near freezing temps tonight.
And that's how we do it here...

 

I'm too cheap to even do that. I ran a thin bead of red rtv around the housing and let it vulcanize and re installed the fan about 2 years ago. Numerous times off and on and all is staying good.

 

Who you calling "young" . Yeah, I may not be quite as old as you, but certainly am no spring chicken .

I presently have about 4 tons. Being a mild winter, and using the mini split on a regular basis during milder days (which is surprisingly competitive cost wise), won't use nearly that much. I also get a lot of my pellets off CL and FBM during the off-season, so don't usually pay market prices for 1/2 to 3/4 of my stash. Prices always go up on pretty much everything, it's the way of things. My electric is going up 8% this month, but my company raised rates back in August because natural gas rates were rising, so the massive sticker shock that other people are experiencing is different than my circumstance.

 

Maintenance on these nut burners is a regular thing, and I want it as easy and quick as possible.
I think I originally bought 5 of the silicone gaskets.....
So far the original is doing quite well. (So we have 4 spares)
I do not want to have to fight getting that fan off....not even......

The silicone gasket releases from the fan/housing real easy by slipping a thin blade putty knife between the gasket and housing and a bit of wiggle ...its off.....

 

Works the same with a thin bead of red RTV on the mounting flange. Once it vulcanizes it's never sticky or an issue to remove the fan. I did use the pre made red gaskets on the room air blowers to insulate them from the firebox and cut the harmonic noise down.

 

it's cold here again this AM. Thermometer outside shows 11 big ones. 70 inside and 50% RH as usual. Stove is back to eating fuel like a drunk sailor and so is the humidifier eating distilled water at a high rate of consumption as well. Central furnace came on for a short time early this am. Ordered a Therm Guard for it 2 days ago, will see how it works on it.

Like I said, my old t'stat had the fan cycle feature on it but alas, I've never been able to find another one.

 

Yeah.....The room fans can get noisy.
I also found that taking the fan off during the off season and taking it outside and blowing the squirrel cage out really well with the high pressure air hose gets all the crud that builds up removed.

Also helps with air movement and vibration.....The crud does not always stick evenly to the blades.....over time the fan starts to vibrate......

The buildup of junk also messes with the fans ability to move air as it should
When we got the stove (Used) the fan blade was choked full of junk.

Pellet dust, pet hair, house dust, and I do not want to know what else.....

 

Every component in both mine comes apart every spring anyway. Bearings get oiled, drive gearboxes get greased, fans get cleaned and the interiors get vacuumed out and I spray down the fireboxes with Stabil Fogging Oil. Take all the venting apart and pressure wash it inside as well. Spring cleaning is an every year thing here.

Being a farmer I learned long ago that maintenace is everything if you don't want issues. All my farm equipment gets serviced prior to storage. That way, when I need it, there is no fiddling around with it or repairing stuff that should have been addressed at the end of the previous growing season.

 

At one time, I considered adding an air filter to the room air blower but not enough room where it's located at. I may install 'z' slides on the exterior of them and add furnace filters instead to capture the dust.

 

How many times have you been able to reuse one?

 

I generally fill a very large heavy duty Rubbermaid container and leave it in garage-dont know how many gallons it equates to but I generally dont need to fill it for several seasons-it was only half full as I havnt used it in so long.

That container is getting heavier as I get older and was planning on using a 5-gal bucket to fill it that way i wouldnt have to life the full thing into the bed of the truck but I think I like your idea better!

Fill several bags, put them in the bed of truck and then dump them into the large container on the floor of the garage-no very heavy lifting at all

 

I mix my corn and pellets in the 'Rubbamaid' trash cans myself, on a skid, 4 at a crack and take my forks on one of the tractors and hoist the whole mess up in the deck and then use a 5 gallon pail to get them to the stove. Running hard like I am now, 4 cans last about a week. I have to say, this year I'm very pleased with the 'Michigan Hardwood' pellets from TSC. Not one bad (wet) bag yet. Just got into the ones I bought this year and I think I'm gonna buy an additional 5 skids of them. I'm a bit nervous about where prices will be next fall. I have a bad feeling that pellet prices will go up substantially.

 

-5 last night here. The upcoming week looks as cold as I can remember since January 2018.

 

I believe I've 'convinced' myself to go buy an additional 4 skids of pellets tomorrow. Prices increase could be a pipe dream but everything in the economy points to a very substantial increase. If I buy an additional 4 skids, I'll have 7 in the barn. Heck, if they get stupid in price I may sell some of the 'stash' off. 4 @ 236 a pop would be 944 clams. Maybe I'll just grab 5. That would be a full gooseneck trailer load.

 

Hmmmm
Well....we are nearly full up on shells...Still cost me $30 to fill the 3 yard dumpster full
About $32 per ton.......
We will be into March before we will have enough room for any more.
Nice part of using a waste product......

 

At that price corncob - I'd be stocking up too. Lowest in my locale is $290, but $300+ for decent softwood pellets is the norm.

Yes sir! I put them on a plastic sled, and slide them the 20 feet down to the woodshed. Leave the last couple of bags, to sand the driveway & walkway after I'm done. ( I'm getting lazy in my old age.)

The new radiator heaters are working well! Arrived yesterday, Kudos to the folks @ Homey D & FedEx for a trouble-free ordering, and delivery experience. They are 'smaller' vs. the old heater previously used, that's why we got (2). Just the one in the laundry room kept things comfortable last evening, another below zero evening ( -8 F ). IR Thermometer shows 155-160 F at the top fins when on full power (1,500 W), about the same as the old unit. Working this evening on cleaning up the front porch room of months of tools / projects to safely install the 2nd radiator out there tomorrow. I'll try to snap a pic of the new heater later. * Thanks again for the heads-up on these JT, Mucho appreciado.

Off to clean up the porch room (and put umpteen months worth of tools away) - have a great evening all.

 

Would you consider shipping across country? ( JK Snowy. I may have to take a road trip though. )