How to Cut Down on Heating Costs With A Pellet Stove

Pellet Stove, Log Cabin, Acid Stained Concrete Floors, Finished Basement

Are you and your heat source ready for winter? We’ve made a few changes to the cabin just recently that I’ve been wanting to do forever. I love the warmth of a fire from wood. When I was growing up we alway had a wood burner in our home, and in our last home we had a pellet burner stove.

A pellet burner has pros and cons but for us the pros of a pellet burner out weight the cons.

We get the warm dry heat like you would from wood. Pellets are pressed sawdust, that look just like a pellet.
The pellets can be bought at any big box store or hardware.
The pellets come in 40lb bags, so they’re easy to handle and store.
No chopping, hauling, or stacking wood.
I can totally maintain and fill the stove on my own.
I’m actually warm in the winter, no more cold toes and fingers.
Our heating cost is cut drastically.
I get a satisfaction from the daily routine.

Painted Stove Pipe With Hight Heat Paint

I’ve been wanting to add a stove to our house forever and hubby was against drilling a hole through the logs for the stove pipe. I nagged every winter and every winter he said no. I even went as far to say just take the glass out of one window for the winter, board it up and vent the stove that way. It wouldn’t be permanent and we could add the glass back in when winter was over. Still I got a NO.

So I gave up the fight for several years. Well with electric, fuel, and everything else costing more right now I asked once again. Hubby gave in and said he would agree to it but the stove had to go in the basement, a place I’ve never revealed before. I didn’t care where it went as long as it heated the house. Not only did we install the stove, hubby also had to put a fan system into our heating ducts to push the heat throughout the cabin.

The install of that was nothing new it’s stuff he does all the time anyway and we already had what we needed to do it. I was so excited for the first burn of the season. The first time it’s fired up it has to burn for 3 hours to cure the metal and burn off the new paint smell. Well of course the day we did that it was warm outside so we had all the windows open and the pellet burner going. I think it worked out good anyway because we didn’t have to smell the burn off process throughout the house.

Just to give you an idea of how much money we saved in our last house, and remember this will depend on how hard the winter is, our normal heating cost, which was propane in our last 1600 square foot house was $2000 per winter. Once we installed the pellet burner it went down to $400 per winter. The initial cost of the stove was $900 so it paid for its self the first winter and still saved us money.

Now the house we are in now is much bigger and we did purchase a stove to accommodate the size but I’m really excited to see how well it works when the temps drop below zero. We still have our geothermal heat system as a back up if need be. I know the stove companies tell you not to use the pellet stove as your only heat system, but I’ve found we never had to turn on our conventional heat system because the pellet stove was able to keep up.

I normally set the thermostat in the winter to 68-72 and I’m never warm. I’m hoping I can crank up the pellet stove and stay nice and toasty this winter and actually feel warm. That chilled to the bone feeling all winter long is miserable.

Hubby and I buy our pellets by the ton. We take our trailer to Tractor Supply and they load them for us. Once we get home hubby unloads the pallets with our bobcat and we store them on the skid right in our basement. I believe we have enough stored right now to get us through the winter. Depending on the winter we will go through 2-4 tons.

We couldn’t find the stove pipe in black with all the parts we needed so I grabbed a can of high heat spray paint to match the stove. Hubby got it all installed before he gave me a chance to paint so I had the task of doing it after it was up. The spray paint cost $4 and to buy the stove pipe in black we would have spent an additional $50 so it’s worth buying the stainless and can of spray paint to save money. The cheapest place I found the paint was Walmart. The big box stores have it too but its over double the cost.

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