With skyrocketing oil prices and growing concerns for our planet, homeowners around the country are searching for affordable and environmentally responsible ways to heat their homes during winter months. This is the time of year when energy usage is at its highest, and fossil fuels are gobbled up by traditional heating methods.
Homeowners searching for an eco-friendly alternative to wood stoves, oil, or gas furnaces can now get stoves that use either corn or pressurized wood pellets as a fuel, and do a great job of heating the home.
Resembling a wood stove in appearance, pellet stoves are attractive additions to any home, and are available in various sizes and price points. Compressed wood waste like sawdust is used to fuel these stoves, which means that no trees are cut for the purposes of heating. Pellet stoves also produce far less pollution than any other heating method, which means they’re the best option for the outside environment and for indoor air quality.
Pellet Stoves require a very small amount of electricity to run. This keeps costs down, but can be a problem in the event of a power outage. Some stoves feature an automatic shut-off that is activated when the electrical supply is interrupted, while others have a backup battery that enables the flame to continue unimpeded.
Unlike Wood Stoves, pellet stoves don’t require constant attention to keep the flame going, and no Chimney is required. A pipe can be vented through an outside wall, making them flexible in terms of placement. In addition, the small amounts of ash that are produced during combustion can be recycled as a nourishing garden fertilizer.
Corn burners are very similar to pellet stoves. In fact, you can now buy models that are compatible with corn, wood pellets, or other biomass such as cherry pits. Corn-burning stoves are energy efficient, and shelled corn has been proven to be a clean-burning fuel that doesn’t add pollutants to the environment.
Choosing to burn corn also reduces the amount of energy that goes into shipping fuel supplies to the area. You can purchase shelled corn from local farmers, which helps the economy and reduces a dependence on foreign-produced oil. In addition, corn is widely available, so you can take comfort in knowing that you’re not depleting precious resources while heating your home.
Those who’ve never used a corn-burning stove may worry about the smell of popcorn radiating throughout the house, but homeowners who use corn as a heating method say that odor is not an issue. Outside where the exhaust is vented, there is a slight smell reminiscent of roasting corn, but it’s neither strong nor unpleasant. Many find the gentle aroma to be warm and inviting—which is a nice change from the smell of smoke that pours out of our fireplaces.
Corn and pellet stoves are continually improving in design and function. While many models work best as a supplemental heat source, manufacturers are developing biomass furnaces that are both energy efficient, and able to heat the entire home. There are also new models on the market that require far less maintenance than pellet stoves that require daily ash removal and cleaning. Look for stoves that have a self-cleaning fire pot, so that you only have to clean the ash pan once a week.
If you’re looking to keep your home cozy this winter, reduce your carbon footprint, AND save up to 80% on your heating bills, look for smart heating alternatives like corn burners and pellet stoves; they offer an attractive and energy efficient way to stay warm this winter.
Karrie Rose
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-improvement-articles/using-biomass-to-heat-your-home-717540.html
Are there any designs using a fireplace to heat a home?
Hey guys,
I was sitting in the lounge at our country farm, and had the fire going, and I was just wondering; we only use a very small proportion of the energy generated by the fire. Imagine if you could heat water, do under floor heating and ware up the home as a whole all from your fireplace!?
It just seems to be an awful waste to let all that energy get released into the atmosphere without making better use of it!
Therefore, are there any companies that make and/or design these sorts of systems? I would never buy one ’cause I’m a great fan of DIY, but I need some ideas. Just trying to do my bit to save energy. I’m not into the whole solar heating and biomass story, just out of personal preference. So ya, any ideas?
Regards
You have to have an airtight ‘stove’ to begin the quest of ‘what more can I do with it? ‘ story. I seen how to cast a copper water pipe coil into plaster, that you apply to the side of an airtight stove, that heated the water in a typical hot water supply tank. 2 ways of water circulation and transfer (to the tank) do work. 1 requires a circulation pump and the other works naturally. For the system to be efficient requires that the ‘stove’ is allways hot. Free hot water means sending that hot water to radiators in far-away rooms. It also meens a tub filled with water ,great to bathe in. An air-tight stove, that can give 200,000 btu, is a great place to start, in a 1500sq ft home, to do double duty. I found that a ‘stove’, that will take 18inch wood, is a great start to make all this work. A stove that makes ash removal a cinch, is a stove that makes the winter a pleasure to endure.
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Yeah. They’re called woodstoves. You can heat a whole home with them and they are far more efficient than a fireplace, which looks pretty but sucks most of the warm air up the chimney, even the air that you paid to heat by some other means. It’s possible to get woodstoves that heat water, and it’s also possible to get wood heat that can be sent through existing air ducts. You might have a bit of a challenge to heat a floor with a home-sized woodstove, but the Romans heated their floors with underfloor passages with warm air flowing through so it can be done. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing as a DIY project unless you’re already an expert so if you get the urge to do it for real, buy the right stuff from someplace that specializes in it.
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