Question for those in colder climates: Pellet HVAC/boilers?
Hi, everyone. I'm on the hunt for opinions. I live in a colder climate in North America with no access to natural gas. Most heat their homes with propane or oil. Mine uses a very old 30+ year old oil boiler. I've started to see more pellet boilers, but I'm a bit uncertain about them at the moment. I don't like burning fossil fuels to heat my home, but electric isn't really an option out here and it's hard to argue with the "tried and true" cast iron boiler with the BTU per gallon oil offers. On the other hand, my local government is practically throwing money and/or attractive financing at people to switch.
I'm curious if anyone out there has made the switch to some kind of pellet-fed heating system from a fossil fuel system. If so, I'd love to hear what you think of them, be it good or bad.
Somewhere in the NE I'm guessing? Sounds like you're in the same situation as I am and feel you. We've got an ancient oil boiler that to its credit still works well, but the costs of oil and age of the boiler is making me start planning.
We installed a pellet stove last year as supplementary heat in case our furnace died in the middle of winter. You can have it automatically turn on and off, run to a set temp, and its largely hand free except for a daily tidying and weekly ash vacuum. Yearly Spring clean of the stove and flue from the installers for around $180. Dealing with the pellets is a pain though. We order two pallets of pellets from our local hardware store and that gets us through the winter, but I have to haul a couple 40 lbs bags from the garage and top the thing up on the regular. I think having a pellet stove is good for supplementary heat and its cozy, but can be finicky and I wouldn't rely on the technology for primary heating. I didn't know a pellet furnace was a thing, but it sounds like a huge pain and from owning a pellet stove I wouldn't go pellet furnace.
We're likely leaning towards heat pumps at this point, but there a few blockers.
That all equals a fairly large price tag, so it sucks.
Our other option would be propane, which would be nice because we can just pop in place of the oil furnace and not have to worry about all of the above. But then we'll still have to deal with fuel deliveries and fluctuating costs (albeit cheaper than oil). We live in a rural area that can be tricky to access during winter storms, so it's not ideal in that respect either.
I don't have an answer yet, but we're saving to tackle it one way or another next year. My ideal set up if I could wave my wand is to have heat pumps supplemented by the pellet stove. Both those things rely on electricity, but I have a whole house backup generator so outages of mid to moderate length are not too much of an issue. Of course that relies on fuel, but a move to solar/batteries would definitely be in the cards after we sort out the HVAC situation.
You may be guessing correctly. To be honest, I'm really looking at them as one system among many. We have baseboard heating throughout the house that I honestly like and it feels like a bit of a shame to leave it all unused. Or worse, go through the effort of getting rid of them. As far as I understand, converting baseboard heating to a heat pump system is not as simple as you might initially think - or at least I initially thought that. But I suspect our situation is a bit different from yours. Our house is a "new" build from the late 1970s.
In the end, the original goal was to have 2-3 sources of heat to help deal with fuel costs, fight back those occasional weeks of extreme cold, and have a way to stay warm if the power goes out for a long period (I can roll out a backup generator, but the less power we can use in that time, the better). So, we already have heat pumps. They work mostly okay, but that might be because of how the registers are placed. I could certainly add a couple more to address that, and perhaps I should. Then another source was going to be an efficient wood stove or two (cord wood, not pellet) in the main areas of the house.
Since I originally figured I'd stick with a fossil fuel boiler (and I still may), I thought it would really just be there on those truly cold days or if one of the other heat sources failed for one reason or another. I just didn't know pellet boilers existed. Maybe I just need to give up on our old baseboards.
Yeah, our place is from the 30's and has some old house problems (we wanted character and got it good and bad).
Having multiple systems for heat is the way to go for sure, especially if you experience frequent power outages. With the pellet stove it handles probably 80% of our heating needs and our primary living spaces, but the central boiler is for the further areas of the house (basement, far bedrooms, office). We can add one heatpump to the mix with our current electrical which would help, but the kicker is that all the government rebates and programs don't do much unless you transfer fully off of fossil fuels. It's kind of frustrating.
For what its worth, the current combination of wood burning, heatpumps and/or propane-based central heating seem to be the popular mix for new builds around here. As well as solar, but that's a separate bag.
My dad's home that he bought for retirement only had an old-fashioned woodstove (at one point it had an oil furnace, but that had been removed). He’s since installed a mini-split (heat pump) that can provide some heat during the colder parts of spring and fall (and for when he’s away). The newer heat pumps can function down into the teens (Fahrenheit). He isn’t planning on getting anything oil or gas-fired. There’s a very real advantage of not being reliant on a fossil-fuel supply chain (or price fluctuations!). You may want to look at models that can accept both logs and pellets. Buy pellets for economy/efficiency, but you can still have a few cords of firewood out back in case you are snowed in for a month.
Define “colder”.
If you’re in the United States you may find that an electric heat pump will work better than you expect. It will not be very efficient during the coldest points, but they can be more efficient than a resistive electric heater most of the time. They also have the benefit of cooling the house in summer if that is a concern.
Other than that it might be worth consulting with an HVAC technician.
Edit because I realize that I didn’t actually address your concern:
I haven’t read much into pellet boilers myself, but I would imagine that propane would be slightly less bad for the environment than wooden pellets. Both of them seem like they’re kind of inconvenient for different reasons, but if you are willing to get a big propane tank installed and have a truck deliver it to you, that would be a lot easier to deal with.
I said this in another comment, but we already have some heat pumps. They're in two "main" rooms of the house. It can mostly heat or cool most of the house relatively well. In fairness, I could add additional heads/registers to address that. However, there are times when it easily falls into single digits or less for extended periods. I don't think their alleged inefficiency at those levels is entirely warranted, but I'm still not sure they did all that well keeping up in below zero cold. Of course, to be fair, the oil boiler has to run quite a bit in that kind of cold, too.
I also considered propane. But I was shocked at the additional cost to move the house from oil to propane. On top of that, while it's cleaner, propane's price shot up while I wasn't paying attention these past few years. I think the sales pitch, here, is that burning pellets is carbon neutral and cheaper while propane is cleaner but not quite that good. Whether that's true or not, I couldn't say. After all, I remember the sales pitch for propane being eerily similar 6-10 years ago
When I was younger my family used a pellet furnace. I hated that thing.
The pellets always burned better on the right side than the left side, despite all of the fiddling we could possibly do with the air intake. This meant that there was a bunch of buildup of poorly-burned pellets that would end up spilling over during the course of the day.
Cleaning it out was a chore. During the windiest parts of winter, dealing with a pile of ashes was a mess at best.
The auger would end up jamming for seemingly no reason. We would back it up half a turn and it would go on its merry way, but this was only fixed after we noticed it getting colder.
Maybe we had crappy pellets. Maybe our house wasn't good for it for some reason. Maybe we just had a crappy burner. All of that said, we kept using it for several years so it must have been very cheap to run.
From the UK here so possibly not the same situation as you guys over the pond.
The government here also threw money at people to install them and still pays money back to you if you supply energy back to the grid (up to a cap per month).
My family got one installed in our family farm just before covid so I'll list the pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
If you cut your own wood and chip/pellet it anyway, I can see it being a pretty great boon. For us it's pretty annoying sourcing the wood every month or two and paying the premium.
Also pellet is way, way more dense, it'll run a lot longer on pellets but sometimes needs must and we have to run on chips because we can't get pellets or they are just priced terribly.
I don't know your circumstance but I'd look into other forms of heating. Ground or air sourced heat pump, solar, etc.
That's my 2 cents.
Do you mind if I ask whether you recall what the brand was? It looks like most pellet boilers come from Europe (Austria, I believe), so I can't help but wonder if it's the same one they install here. I'm glad to at least hear they provide a nice amount of comfortable heat. It's interesting, though. Over here they want to install an external storage container that can hold around five tons. Then there are trucks that can deliver the pellets. They have a long hose they use to pump the pellets into the storage container upon delivery. They seem functionally identical to the oil trucks that deliver heating oil around my area. Now I wonder if this is unique to North America, or even just my region.
Still, your con regarding the math worries me, too. They claim pellets are cheaper. While that's true, they're not that much cheaper, and they still suffer from occasional price fluctuations.
Assuming you are in North America, most (all?) firewood/pellets will be grown on the same continent, so you should have less fluctuations on transport costs.
That was my hope. Honestly, one of the selling points for me is that the fuel would be locally sourced (probably).
I'd say you might want to read about heat pumps more in depth. They're really way more effective at lower temperatures than the zeitgeist / paid marketing might have led you to generally believe.
Eh, I can see the spike in my electrical bill when the heat pumps cross over from 'more efficient' to 'about the same' to 'less efficient'. Home is mostly minisplit heat pumps with some supplemental resistive. Have a fair number of solar panels on the roof.
That threshold is about 36F. Any prolonged cold snap below that, especially if cloudy, and my electric bill triples.
It works for me, because we typically only get a week or two below 30ish 24/7, and the efficiency for the other 90% of the time makes up for it.
Ah, we meet again in the heat pump department. Some numbers as I did em just today.
2360.x kWh to heat and cool my 2082 sq. Ft home from 2/21/23 until today on my geothermal heat pump. Zero other sources of heating or cooling, other than ya know, my resistive dryer (gross), my electric oven, or my vampire heat pump water heater. Oh, and the desuoherheater gives me some solid free hot water in the summer months.
If you take the EPA's estimate of ~33 kWh per gallon of gasoline, it has taken 70 gallons of gasoline to do all heating and cooling of my home in that time. Which amounts out to .16 gallons a day. My electricity is a bit crazy expensive at .21c a kWh. A grand total of $496 for all that time in electricity.
I'll take it. Especially when you I don't factor in that I generate the electricity on my roof.
I don't miss my 2x a year $600 propane bills.
Same kwh price here, about same sqft. In Jan/Feb, when it is coldest and solar generation lowest, my bill will spike to about $700. This is down from $1200, when it was just resistive heating.
I actually go negative in April now instead of having a $200 bill.I won't get another electric bill until September courtesy of the solar panels, and will stay under $200 until December.
Look into the GE profile ventless all-in-one. Also was a great investment when my washer died, let me get rid of the dryer too and free up some floorspace.
I've almost pulled the trigger on a heat pump / ventless about five times in the last few months. Negative comments keep taking me off the precipice. I'm sure it'd be totally fine and worth it. My iotawatt on my panel proves the resistive dryer is easily the largest load other than EV charging at this point.
It's hilarious, actually, seeing a clothes dryer take 3x the load of my whole house heating or cooling.
Heat pump water heater was so much better than resistive as well. The desuperheater doesn't do much in the winter, but even just filling its tank in the winter (in the basement) lets the water come up by about 5-15°F compared to what it comes in as from supply.
Also, that winter bill is tough. My commiserations!
With the size of my array, I had a $135 bill in January or so. This march bill was $35, and the April one should be back to negative.
This was my first year with geo and solar, but not a completely full year. 2024 will be my first where I'm generating solar any earlier than May. So I'm hopeful that this next winter I can keep my negative electricity balance through the year. But I'm not sure.
I'm lucky in that I intentionally bought my house with a perfectly south facing roof on purpose.
Couple of disclaimers before I get started:
Two years ago I became the proud owner of a "serious" pellet setup, at least it is for me. It's a Viessmann Vitoligno 300P furnace that was installed in 2009. It's already a big machine, but next to it is a big warm water tank that can combine multiple heat sources (for instance solar and pellet) to heat the central heating water. This already takes up most of the mudroom space. Behind the mudroom is a separate small addition for a 5m3 hopper. The hopper is connected to the furnace pellet storage through a vacuum system. Central heating water is pumped through the system with a "smart" setup that decides when water needs to go into the tank, or when it needs to circulate. There's some black magic involved, I'm sure.
I hope this already sets the tone: this is your average over engineered German setup with a lot of moving parts. It took me a full summer to get the system cleaned and working properly again. The previous owner clearly had no idea what they were doing: the fan was blocked, the automated cleaning was seized, the ash tray was missing important gaskets, the tank was shut off for some reason, etc. It really was a fun tinkering project. Now, the system runs faultless and I'm very pleased with it.
We filled the hopper last summer for the first time. From what we've heard from neighbors, pellet prices have gone through the roof in the last couple of years. I'm not sure that's different from all other sources; gas, oil, wood, all have increased dramatically. The setup here is very convenient: a truck rolls up to the house and blows a couple of cubic meters of pellets into the storage in less than 30 minutes. If we would need to haul that stuff in ourselves, I would probably be a lot less happy with this system.
To sum things up:
I'm not sure I can get the brand for you I'm afraid, I actually moved out the end of last year so I can just check.
As for the storage that sounds decent. Out home built hopper probably only holds about 2 or 3 tons, 5 would keep you going for a good while for sure.
We load ours ourselves, a forklift and cut the bottom out a bag. So the delivery system they are proposing over there sounds like a done deal to me if the prices are solid.
A huge, huge amount of our wood is imported from Europe and it's a fortune now. We do have forestery in the UK but it's tiny compared to the demand.