For the moment, convenience, plus I want to give the Ecoteck Francesca, a small stove that has a deep burn pot, another try w/ Hardwoods, now that we have an Outside Air Kit installed. The Barefoots are local to work, so picking them up is not out-of-route / a dedicated long-haul trip, in any case. IOW, just wanna see if the Pellet Piglet here can burn a good hardwood pellet, with some tuning.
Only because of the deep burn pot, it requires a lot more combustion air (vs. softwood pellets) to push the ash out, else the burn pot clogs / smothers eventually. I can 'torch' them, but that pushes a lot of heat out of the stove -> up the flue. It's simply a function of the deep burn pot, and the (3") length of travel required to push ash out from the burn pot. But that is not a stove issue, so much as my inexperience and inability to tune the stove when I tried this last season, bearing in mind I was a complete 'newb' at that point. A little older, and hopefully wiser now. The Ecoteck stove is neat, every setting is programmable and accessible, you can adjust combustion air by increments of 10 RPM while the stove is running, plus it has 'user' draft control to fine-tune both the pellet feed rate and combustion air, once you establish a baseline for burning.. So you can setup a baseline of "zero", and further trim from -5 to +5 on both combustion air and pellet feed rate independently, to dial in an ideal burn setting. The older Ecoteck stoves in general, and the Francesca here in particular (the smallest one of the bunch) are best suited for softwood pellets, but I had some success burning Cubex hardwood pellets last season, 100% on a limited test, and excellent success as a 50/50 blend for a 3 day period. * Only other hardwood tried last season was Pennington, but the ones here were not a "100% wood pellet", more of a wood/plastic blend.. Bleh. Still a little torqued over it, and the resulting cleaning required, nothing like the fine smell of burnt plastic while one is scrubbing their stove and venting.. But nothing some Beer therapy couldn't fix. -- I'm going to try a few bags of Barefoot Pellets as soon as the Mrs. gives her blessing to "begin the burn" season (and 'maybe' even before, when she's at work - what she don't know... ) - worse case scenario is I am unable to achieve a good burn scenario at 100% hardwood in the stove, then they'll get blended 50/50 and become fine roasted goodness, regardless. Time to grab the pocket protector and lab coat, let the experimentation (and smoothie sampling) begin!
