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Pellet Stoves and Electricity

Pellet stoves are now the hot way to heat a home. They offer a green, cheap form of energy that can effectively heat an entire home, whether from radiated heat or by using a forced-air system. From the sound of it, you might be imagining that a pellet stove works just like a more traditional wood-burning stove except in the fact that it burns pellets. This perception, though common, isn't quite right; pellet stoves actually use some electricity.

Every pellet stove has a hopper that holds a certain amount of pellets, which can run the stove for one or two days without attendance and reloading. The hopper feeds pellets to the stove on a set basis, and its action is often linked to a thermostat, which tells the hopper when to continue feeding pellets and when to cut off the supply because the room is warm enough.

This makes a pellet stove convenient because it can regulate the temperature of your home better than a wood stove can and because you don't have to manually stoke it more than once a day at most. On the other hand, the need for electricity can make a pellet stove a little less convenient than a wood-burning stove because if the electricity goes out, it will stop feeding pellets to the fire.

This problem can be solved by adding a battery-operated attachment to the stove, which can work in the event that the electricity goes out. You can also be sure that you have a generator which will power your lights and pellet stove if the electricity goes out mid-winter. These two options mean that there is really no reason you should avoid a pellet stove because it takes electricity.

Even though freestanding pellet stoves take some electricity, they will still consume less energy, overall, than furnaces. Besides this, the energy that they do consume will be much more clean than that from natural gas or wood-burning stoves.