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Steve
 
Posts: n/a
Default Corn Furnaces make national news

You should remember, you need to run a combustion blow as well and with a
third hand (spouse) you crank the convection blower.

My stove has two combustion blowers, one blowing air through the fire pot
and another to draw a vacuum on the whole combustion chamber and draft up
the flue.

The reality is, for the automatic combustion pellet stove, it will take a
good size battery to keep the controls and blowers going, not to mention the
igniter.

Steve

"Martin H. Eastburn" wrote in message
...
Generally I like those in concept. Chip type anyway - corn is fine also.

I'd have an inverter on a battery on a charger - or a UPS large enough to
last
blackouts...

Hard to turn the screw to crank fiber to the fire. Wish there were thermo
couples
on the stack to generate the power to turn the screw! That might be an
idea.
Then a small startup battery would do it in a blackout.

Martin
Martin Eastburn
@ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net
NRA LOH & Endowment Member
NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder



Steve wrote:
I have been burning wood fiber pellets for 3 years and it sure beat the
labor involved in cutting/splitting wood (which is available on my
property or near by)..

The efficiency of a modern pellet/corn stove are up around 85%. If you
don't believe the literature, just place your had on the unjacketed flue
pipe of a well tuned pellet stove.

My present stove (Quadri-Fire) is capable of burning corn but will not
ignite automatically unless there is about 25% mix of pellets. Once lite,
it will burn until the thermostat turns it off. On pellets, it will run
on automatic continuously, as long as there is a thermostat demand and
fuel in the hopper. It will re-ignite automatically on pellets.

The only other maintenance is a weekly clean of the small amount of fine
ash and an annual cleaning of the heat exchanger. Good quality pellets
only have about 1% ash.

Not sure of these figures for corn but have heard they are similar.

If I had a good supply of corn in my Pac. NW area, I would give it a
try.. Pellets presently cost me $139 a ton or about.

I can heat my very old mfg home (1152 sq/ft) on about 3 ton a year.

The stove is of marginal size, 40,000 btus but provides as much heat as I
need.

I consider corn a renewable energy source while wood pellets are
presently a wood by-product. The local demand for wood fiber for paper
and partial board may soon drive the price of wood pellet high enough
that corn my be the next alternative.


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