So we were going to do what we were expressly told not to do. Again. We were going to buy a pellet stove and try to heat a whole house with it.

I was in good company. Everyone buys a pellet stove or wood-burning furnace and immediately ignores the not-very-fine BOLD print that tells you not to try to use these “add-on” stoves and freestanding appliances as your main(e) source of heat. They’re supposed to supplement your existing heating system. You know, the one you don’t have, or you wouldn’t be buying a big, honking pellet stove. In their hearts, they know that you can’t depend on these things to work continuously and reliably. They’re just getting out in front of their scathing Yelp reviews with a big warning not to even try it.

There are such things as pellet furnaces, and they can act as a 100% substitute for an oil burner or gas furnace or whatever. They’re really big, and really expensive, and really weird, if you ask me. Burning pellets doesn’t lend itself to too much automation. When you’re burning other sorts of fuel, the thermostat goes off, the burner kicks on, and some fuel gets squirted into a burn chamber to boil water or heat  air or whatever. When it’s sweltering next to the thermostat, it turns off.

Pellets don’t co-operate like that. You have to ignite a hearty handful of them to get them going, and once they are going, they have to burn until they’re gone. That arrangement doesn’t work all that well with thermostats. But if you must, you can see how you can have an oil boiler without the oil:

There’s some handwaving in there about emptying ash drawers and so forth. But I didn’t need that to put me off a fully automated hands-off pellet heating system. They all cost eleventy-gorillion dollars, and I only have toll change and couch cushion pennies to spend on my setup.

So we would be buying an appliance, not a heating system. A freestanding pellet stove, not a pellet furnace or boiler. There are about eleventy-gorillion models and brands of pellet stoves, all sold by maybe three companies, and all made in one factory in Shanghai, from what I can gather.

A pellet stove works like this:

I looked around quite a bit. Everyone said buy a Harman pellet stove. They reminded me of woodworkers who demand that you only buy Delta tools, or mechanics and their Snap-On mania. A Harman stove cost like five grand and had to be installed by the dealer. Hard pass. We had to take care of this problem ourselves. We eventually cast a longing eye on a Vogelzang pellet stove at the local Harrow Stockpile store.

Why? Because it was big, and because it was cheap. Like our wood furnace, it was the floor model, and toddlers had been swinging on its door for several seasons. There were a few parts missing. But it made a lot of heat. How much heat, exactly? God only knows.

You see, pellet stove makers use the same dodge that wood stove dudes use. They tell you how many square feet of house you can heat with one, because, as you know, a dwelling just outside Miami Florida has the same heating load as one just outside Miami University in Ohio. If you take one of the salesman’s family hostage, and demand to know exactly how many BTUs the thing puts out, they’ll ask you which family member you’ve got chained in your basement. They won’t give up that kind of info for a mother-in-law or teenaged girl with an Instagram account. Under additional duress, they’ll blurt out 65,000 BTUs, which is a good honest lie. But you can work with it.

You see, you can do your own arithmetic here, and figure out just what percentage of the BTU number is bosh. The hopper of a VG 5790 holds 120 pounds of pellets. They claim it will run for up to 80 hours on that load, which is another fib, but let’s run with it. A little math get applied and it’s supposedly burning 1.5 pounds of pellets an hour. That’s 12,000 BTUs, if you give a very generous estimate of how many BTUs there are in a pound of pellets (8,000). These manufacturers seem to test their stoves with trees from the gasoline forest in a laboratory with 100% oxygen in it. But even crap pellets will give you 7,000 BTUs per pound, and la-di-da softwood pellets might give you 8,000.

What happened to 65,000 BTUs, you might ask. Well, the thing does have five speeds. Each increment dumps more pellets into the burn pot, turns up the fans, and give you more heat, but less and less of that 80 hour run time we mentioned. I guess in theory, you could get some of the magical jet fuel-soaked pellets these tests use, and turn the stove up to five, and squint some, and forget to turn off the regular furnace, and get somewhere close to 60,000 BTUs per hour. Of course they tell you not to run the stove on five continuously, or it will glow like Chernobyl after an hour or so.

But I didn’t really need to worry about the party line on how many BTUs this thing could put out. All I had to do was compare one company’s fibs to the other company’s lies, and take the one who told the biggest whopper. The Vogelzang VG 5790 was the biggest one there was, so that’s the one I wanted.

[to be continued]

[Update: many thanks to Cletus Socrates for his uber-generous hit on our tip jar, and his Christmas wishes. It is very much appreciated]