So you have chosen to opt for a pellet stove to heat your home or business. Using wood pellets for heating is a much cheaper option, and also reduces carbon emissions and benefits the environment. So how do you pick the best pellet burner for your needs, what are the specific features you need, and what details will make the difference in terms of a quality heater? These are all valid and important questions, as anyone who presumes all pellet stoves are the same is simply wrong, and that assumption could lead to purchasing a poor quality pellet burner.
So first lets look at how much fuel the Quadrafire pellet stoves can hold. These units have some of the largest inbuilt hoppers on the market, and hopper extensions are available to extend the running time of the unit up to around a week without the need to refill the hopper. As well as having a hopper that can hold a lot of fuel, how it feeds that fuel into the fire is evenly if not more important. All pellet burners use a timed auger to get the pellets into the combustion chamber. The design of the feed system is crucial for reliable burner operation. Some units are built with fairly fragile augers and motors, and in some circumstances they can get blocked with a pellet, which is only a few millimeters too long in length. No pellet burner manufacture should resume the pellets are all a perfect length and should be designed to deal with it. Quadrafire simply put in better augers and motors, which can break off oversized pellets if needed.
Now the fuel feed system has been looked at, the next important factor is the combustion zone or more specifically the burn pot. Here is where the action really happens, and the true indication of a quality pellet stove. There are several burn pot designs, and the most common design is the drop down burn pot. Here the pellets fall into the burn pot, and the only means of ash removal is from the forced air used to aid combustion. The problem with this system is, what is the air flow is insufficient to move all of the ash? This will create an ash build up, and this will eventually cause the pellet stove to detect a fault. Therefore the drop down pellet burn pot is not the design, as the ash content of fuel pellets can easily vary.