Winter is on the way and it is time to get ready.  One of the things we have to do here is clean up the wood pellet stove.  My husband takes care of this very well.  We love our wood pellet stove.  It is our main source of heat for our house.  It is Harmon pellet stove.  We purchase about 1 1/2 – 2 tons of pellets for the season.  Our house is small about 1000 square feet and we get low temperatures here at the coldest we can get below 0 degrees .  For the last four years that we have owned the stove we have spent maybe $50.00 a month in heating costs so this stove has saved us plenty of money and paid for itself more than once.  They really are very efficient and well made. Here is a link to help calculate the comparisons:  http://www.fuelstart.com/tools/energytools.aspx

We do shut down the stove and clean it out once a month as advised by the company.  We do a more thorough cleaning in the fall before we fire it up for the season.  This cleaning requires pulling the stove out and taking the back off and cleaning out all the fans and motors.  We have pets and it can get pet hair and dust build up.  This year it was a little different though.  We noticed last year the auger was making some noise.  My husband took out the auger to clean the feeder tube.  We found a caked on substance that was gummy and tar like.  This had to be due to the quality of the pellets we purchased.

We did have some problems with a ton of pellets we purchased.  They were soft and there was a lot of dust in the bag.  So much dust from the pellets falling apart that I had to sift the pellets before I could load them into the hopper.  We did complain and the company that made the pellets reimbursed us for this.

Any problems we have had with this stove, we have been taken care of with great customer support.  I can not rave about this product enough.  Our old source of heat was propane.  We bought the stove the year everything went up so high.  We would of had to pay $1,200.00- $15,00.00 for the season for heat that year.  Instead we put the money into a wood pellet stove.  Now even if we don’t get the spring price for the pellets we don’t spend more than $500.00 for the whole season to heat the house usually it is more like $350.00-$400.00.  There is electric motors that run on the stove but this cost in electricity is not even noticed on my electric bill.  It was well worth the investment.

If we have a power outage and the electric is going to be off for an extended amount of time we fire up the generator and plug the pellet stove into it along with the refrigerator and we are fine, Oh, and the TV.

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