Buying Corn & Wood Pellets for your stove
or fireplace
The MagnuM and Country Flame products are
capable of burning shelled corn, wood pellets,
a variety of both as shown here where they’re
actually both mixed together. This happens
to be a 50/50 blend of Eagle Fuel. And also
listed for other new biomass fuels that are
coming out on the market. What we want to
do in this demonstration is talk a little
bit about the fuel quality, how to burn the
appropriate fuel in your appliance and how
to troubleshoot and make sure that you get
the best value for your money. And the first
place to start is where in the world do you
get the fuel for your appliance? If you’re
deciding to use wood pellets as your primary
source, you’re going to want to make sure
that you get out and find a good supplier
of premium grade wood pellets. A couple words
of caution is make sure that you do not buy
wood pellets that have been left over for
the season and are a year old. Because the
pellets will take on moisture and can start
to crumble. And a good indicator of this is
when you open up the pellet bag, check to
see how many fines and clumps of fuel and
things like that might be inside the bag.
If you see an excessive amount of fines or
if you see clumps of fuel, don’t buy that
fuel. You’ll have nothing but trouble with
that in your appliance. Make sure and talk
to your supplier about the quality of the
fuel and the consistency of the fuel. And
try to get it from one consistent brand so
that your stove will be able to be set and
be able to work on that all the time. The
same goes if you’re burning shelled corn.
If you’re buying shelled corn from numerous
suppliers, you’re going to run into a very
inconsistency. You might find corn that’s
around 10 or 11 percent moisture. You might
be buying corn that’s 15 percent moisture.
And it’s all blended together into one.
And that’s why you want to get a good consistent
fuel supplier so that you don’t buy either
the higher moisture or just simply the lower
moisture. So find yourself a good consistent
supplier whenever you’re going to go out
and get fuel. One fuel that we do recommend
is the Eagle Biofuel and what’s nice about
this fuel is it’s distributed all around
the United States in different forms. You
can buy it in 40 and 50 pound bags and either
a 50/50 mix of corn and wood pellets, you
can buy 40 pound bags of wood pellets only,
you can also buy solid corn only or other
variations of the fuel.
The fuel is clean, it’s guaranteed to be
premium quality and it is delivered anywhere
in the United States. If you’re going to
be buying fuel from a local supplier, make
sure that you don’t hold any fuel over from
the previous season. But make arrangements
with that elevator or that farmer or that
co-op, the Fleet Farm, wherever you’re going
to buy your fuel from. Make arrangements to
pick up your fuel in the fall, make sure that
it’s good new fuel and make sure that you
use that fuel up over the course of the winter.
When storing your fuel, you want to make sure
that you’re in a clean, dry environment.
If you store the fuel outside and you get
into a rainstorm or a snowstorm and it takes
on moisture, in particular with wood pellets,
the quality of your fuel is going to go down.
The fuel will swell up, it will start to break
apart, you won’t get the BTU’s out of
it, you’ll have inconsistent feed and inconsistent
burn in the firepot. Your unit will tend to
go out unexpectedly. So make sure that that
fuel is the way that it is. Now when choosing
your fuel and if, let’s say you decide to
burn straight corn in your appliance, it’s
very difficult to light corn by itself. I’ll
give you just a little bit of a demonstration
here and we’ll take just a little bit of
starter fuel and put on top of the corn and
we’ll give it a light. So what happens is
because corn takes an especially high kindling
temperature before it can ignite, what’s
going to happen is it’s going to burn off
the alcohol that’s in the starter gel and
the corn will not get a chance to light. And
so what you want to do when you’re lighting
corn is you put in a handful of wood pellets
first and you dump that into your firepot.
Then you go ahead and you put your gel on
top of that, you light that, mix the gel in
with the wood pellets and then when the corn
feeds in through the auger system it’s going
to light appropriately. A few other things
to take care of and watch for when you’re
talking about fuel is humidity. If your home
is running exceptionally high humidity like
in the basement, you may have a tendency in
your fuel to stick together as it flows down
through the auger system. So you want to make
sure and control the humidity in your home
and make sure that the humidity is low enough
so that it will not affect the fuel feeding
system. Which will then affect the quality
of the burn that’s inside your firepot.
And here again, you can combine several different
fuels together. The MagnuM appliances are
certified for wood pellets, for shelled corn,
a mixture and blend of both of them, also,
you can burn regular red wheat. In the Country
Flame product line, they’re certified for
shelled corn, wood pellets, and a variety
of both.
