Pellet Burning Fireplace Inserts
Pellet inserts burn pellets. These pellets actually are recycled sawdust, wood shavings, corn, walnut and peanut shells, and similar biomass wastes that are ground up into small pellets, compressed and extruded for use in your stove. The pellets range from 3/8-inch to 1-inch-long and look like rabbit feed, and they're sold in manageable 40-pound bags. Some pellet stoves are also designed to burn corn kernels, nutshells, and wood chip making your stove burn more efficiently.
Pellets and related fuels turn wastes that would otherwise be dumped at landfills into energy, lessening our dependence on oil. Both because of a pellet insert fuel's consistency and because of the stove's combustion mechanics, pellets burn very hot. This means they burn more efficiently and cleaner than wood. Intense compression squeezes the moisture out of pellets, dropping their moisture content to below 8%, which is very dry compared to cord wood that has from 20% to 30% moisture. The dryer the fuel, the more heat it can produce. And the high-temperature fire burns more of the fuel.
Compared to EPA-certified wood stove insert that give off about 5 grams of particulates per hour, pellet inserts have very low particulate emissions, some far less than 1 gram per hour. Combustion efficiency is a measure of how much of a fuel is converted to energy by an appliance. Pellet stoves offer 75% to 90% overall efficiency (be sure to look for "overall efficiency" when comparing). In fact, so much heat is extracted that most pellet stoves may be vented horizontally out through a wall instead of through a conventional chimney.
