Wait, what? All that blather and you’re not even burning firewood anymore? Have you no shame, Sippican?

No. No I don’t. I came defective from the factory. I shed my skin and slither away noiselessly pretty regularly. Get used to it.

The wood furnace doesn’t owe us anything. It’s still in place in case of emergencies. It’s a simple beast and will last a very long time. But relying on firewood for whole-house heat was too much work for us. It was very cheap to buy the furnace, it was very straightforward to install it, and firewood doesn’t cost much, at least in the scheme of things. But I wanted to sleep for four hours at a stretch once in a while.

I ruled out oil. Again. Oil heat is popular around here, almost universal, but it reminds me of picking a fight in a bar with someone you don’t know. He might go into the fetal position fairly readily. He might have a black belt. The point is, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Every few years, the price of heating oil goes parabolic. You might do your calcs at $2.50 a gallon, but find out someone got a tanker stuck in the Suez or something and the price goes to $5, and your bill goes to eleven. The heating plants are fairly complicated, and expensive. You have to know more than a little HVAC, electrical, and plumbing to install one correctly.

Propane is available around here. But it’s actually fairly expensive. The furnaces are cheap, though, but only if you get one that’s not very efficient. And if you install it wrong, your house can join the space program. hard pass.

But I needed something that ran for more than three or four hours at a stretch. I cast a longing eye at pellet stoves.

If you’re unfamiliar with pellet stoves, you’re not alone. They’re lumped in with everything labeled “biomass” in those weird websites where everyone is wearing socks and Birkenstocks, sporting a manbun, and saving the planet by recycling their urine into mead smoothies or something similar. But they’re not wrong, they’re just strange. Pellet stoves are pretty neat. If you’re wondering how pellet stoves compare to burning firewood, you can read this: Top Ten Ways Wood Pellets Beat Firewood.  If you scroll to the bottom to the comments, you can see the firewood devotees foaming at the mouth, but I can testify everything in that list is true.

Pellets look like this:

They’re little extruded cylinders of dried, chopped up wood. People think they’re made of sawdust, but they’re not, really. More like corn flake-sized wood chips. They’re fairly hard, and have a kind of glossy finish on them. That’s simply from the heat and the pressure of forcing them through an extruder. They’re 100% wood with no added ingredients. The ones on the left in the fuzzy photo are a mixture of hard and softwood. The ones on the right are 100% softwood. Softwood costs more, and burns hotter. They smell nice. I don’t know what they taste like, but I bet it tastes better than a urine mead smoothie.

Softwood burning hotter than hardwood sounds counterintuitive to many folks, but it’s true. There’s more lignin in softwood per pound, and lignin burns ever so much hotter than cellulose. The paper mill down the street captures the lignin from their wood chips, and only uses the cellulose part to make paper. The lignin is concentrated into a kind of all-natural crude oil they call “black liquor,” and burned on an industrial scale to make electricity. The hardwood/softwood mix is plenty good enough, and much cheaper; usually $50 per ton cheaper. Even cheap pellets are creeping up to $300 a ton nowadays, but when we started burning them, you could sometimes find them for around $200 a ton.

Pellets come in 40-pound bags, usually. You can buy them almost everywhere around here. There are a lot of brands, and people swear by or at one brand or another to taste. There are several pellet mills within driving distance of my house. The normal way to buy them is by the ton, however (50 bags of 40 pounds each), and to have them delivered. They’re shrink wrapped on the pallet to keep them dry. A pallet of pellets (that’s fun to say; go ahead, say it) looks like this:

This one’s half unwrapped, and ready to go down our pellet chute. That’s a little number we made to make life easier. There used to be a coal chute right there, and we repurposed the window to accept pellet bags. Like this:

You wax the plywood, of course. It’s also more fun to say wheee! as the pellets go down the chute. Well, it’s fun for the guy that doesn’t have forty pounds hurtling at his head.

A pallet of pellets (a ton) has about the same amount of BTUs in it as a cord of firewood, which made figuring out how much we needed easier. We usually bought eight tons, but had the deliveries come two tons at a time. My sons would stand in the driveway, unwrap the pallets, and send the bags down the chute one at a time. I was in the basement, and caught them, and stacked them on pallets in our basement. If you’ve never had forty pounds thrown at you 100 times in an hour and a half, you haven’t lived.

But hey, if we have eight tons of pellets in the basement, I suppose we should get a pellet stove. They’re hard to shoplift, so I guess we’ll have to figure out some way to buy one.

[To be continued]