Subject: Re: Wood stove v. pellet stove

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 23:47:10 GMT

Logs make a mess.  Pellets are more expensive.  If you can,
install a wood-burning furnace in the basement, keep the
mess out of the living room.  Better yet, a furnace that
can also burn oil.  Water radiators are much better than
forced hot air (quiet, no dust).  Either way, retrofitting
a furnace into a house is expensive.  A wood stove in the
living room will make the living room too hot while the
bedrooms are too cold.  (That's what I have...)

- Moshe

Re: Wood stove v. pellet stove                                               R

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From: [email-masked] (Mark. Gooley)
Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 00:32:49 GMT

>bedrooms are too cold.  (That's what I have...)

Read Robertson Davies (writing as "Samuel Marchbanks" -- there is an
omnibus collection of his newspaper pieces from the late Forties and
early Fifties called, I think, _The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks_)
on stoking a coal-and-wood-fired furnace in a basement.  They're
probably better these days, but it sounds nightmarish.  I think that
his was forced hot-air.

I read an article in _Back Home_ magazine (Winter '94/'95, I think --
just picked up a copy at a newsstand) on external wood-burning furnaces.
One uses pipes in an insulated trench to run water in a loop between a
furnace (that's in its own small shed) and the house.  With heat-exchangers
one can use forced-air and also heat water to send to the taps.  The author
of the article boasts about how his house is almost uninsulated, about how
with a good supply of wood from his own lot he can waste heat like crazy
and still have almost no heating bill -- sounds a bit silly, there.  The
external furnace reduces the fire hazard, lets you store wood near the
furnace and not in the house, is easier to retrofit (you can keep your old
forced-air system or radiators), and ensures that you won't have to go
into a basement to stoke it.  You can get crude control via a thermostat-
controlled damper, etc.

Mark., no personal experience of any of this, having lived with forced-air
gas heat most of my life
[email-masked]