Thanks-Good advice on heating,have not even thought about some of these.

Surprisingly, it does do a good job of heating, vs. our old, enormous wood stove, because there is a fan built in giving it a ‘forced air’ factor. Before our kitchen would be a 45C, while the other rooms were almost at freezing levels. The fan made it easy to get the air flowing to the other rooms and prevent the main room from being too hot. It was still very inefficient, and you could never turn them up to their ‘max’ setting without them over heating. So it would get to a point where if the house was still cold, and the stove was on as high as it could handle. Tough luck, the house was stuck at 10C at times.

I do agree, there wouldn’t be much difference in pollution using pellet or wood, they are both releasing carbon as they are the same material. But the chimney didn’t make visible smoke or odour after we switched over, it did seem to burn ‘lighter’. Also the ‘back-of-your-mind-worry’ of chimney fires was less pronounced.

My other cons on a wood pellet is the maintenance. It required more cleaning, more frequently than the wood stove, it was ‘fussy’ to clean (a lot of nooks and crannies), and was just as bad for the ‘soot indoors’ factor. Also, we need a totally dry place to store the bags, or they become expensive soggy pile of sawdust. The wood pile could stay outdoor in all weather. I also found the pellet stoves noisy (we had two different models 10 years apart, the newer one was better, but still made a racket). And having to lift a 40lb sack every day was hard on my tiny 4foot 10 frame. Also, if the power went out, so did the heater, which is never a good thing to rely on in an area with frequent winter storms. We’ve had to ‘abandon house’ a few times, where as with the wood stove there was no reasons to.

Personally, I would never install a pellet stove ever again. I’d rather go back to wood, and having to relight the fire at 2 am.

In either case they both made my home or yard cluttered, and made the inside of my home dirty. When I build my home in the next few years, I am seriously considering geothermal.