|
Actually the pellets are not wood chips; they are sawdust, pressurized into pellet shape. A chipper could not produce them.
Burning the pellets is NOT dirty. They are combusted very efficiently, giving off mostly CO2 and water, which is what you get when you burn oil or nat gas cleanly as well. If you haven't seen a pellet stove burn, I can understand the confusion, because you may be thinking it burns like wood in a fireplace. Not true.
As far as the corn, we cleaned the stove this morning, and it was definitely dirtier than any other week we have used it. We burned a 50% mix of corn and pellets most of the week. The weather has been mild, so can't blame the level of soot and ash on anything else but the corn. I spoke with a woman who sells and services these stoves. She indicated that some producers are starting to tailor production of their corn for use in stoves....maximizing the oil content, drying it more thoroughly etc. Appparently the corn we used, plain old cow corn, is quite dirty. We'll be sticking with pellets for the foreseeable future.
|