We have neighbors who have a pellet stove and a generator.

We have a woodburning stove, but would have to shut it down as it gets too hot without the blower running... we now have a generator which we can hook it up to. The stove is useless without a source of electricity.

You might just want to consider a small propane heater (which hooks up to 1 lb. or 20 lb. propane tank outside). It is best to always leave a nearby window cracked to be safe. These come in varying sizes (the one in the link is probably too small).

Here is a link that might be useful: Propane Heater

I have a Jotul woodstove. When my DH was alive and the kids were younger we kept it going 24 hours a day. These days, I let it burn down at night and start another fire in the morning. (I'd probably be better off letting it burn at a reasonable level during the night.) I love it!

I have several east coast friends who use pellet stoves, by the way.

Have you checked out solar panels? You can store the energy in a battery too. No smoke or fumes.

Dilly Dally, are you talking about on the roof of the house? Aren't they really expensive?

Most pellet or corn stoves(1) need three electric motors:
-a small one to suck air from the area for combustion (usually brought in an auxiliary pipe from outside, as it uses so much air: self-defeating to use house air), push it through the small firepot, then out the exhaust (if corn fire doesn't have forced draft, it goes out),
-a tiny one that runs intermittently, a few seconds at a time, to push pellets/corn kernels from the hopper to drop down a tube into a small (usually 4 - 5" almost square) firepot) (2) and
-a somewhat larger one to pull house air into the heat transfer chamber around the fire for heating, then push the heated air back into the area.

Being all quite small motors, they do not draw a large amount of power - probably not over 400 watts, but that's a rough estimate.

A small generator would be adequate - but one would want it to do other things: freezer, frig, light, etc.

A reasonably small inverter or transformer would allow one to use a battery, e.g. car, but one would need to start the vehicle from time to time to recharge the battery - that's when a two-battery system is beneficial, so that one can disconnect the second battery after running the engine, to ensure that enough power was on hand to re-start it when one wanted to charge again ... or travel. For more than rare use, this would be an expensive way to fly - firing a vehicle engine just to charge battery (reasonably frequently).

In a number of emergency circumstances, a generator would not need to be available for each situation, as half a dozen households could share one - each using for most of a couple of hours, twice daily. Less satisfactory to serve a substantial number using a small heating stove(s), as a furnace will bring heat back up in a half hour or so - a corn/pellet stove won't: they're designed for continuous use. They'd have to be restarted each time, as well, something of a procedure.

Good wishes for finding all of the hot air that you need, as efficiently and cheaply as possible.

ole joyful

1. Corn-/grain-fired heaters produce very low levels of pollutants - and most reasonably benign. When the testing agency first ran them, they retested twice, as they thought there'd been mistakes!

2. It's hard to believe that a little 4" - 5" firepot can put out enough heat to warm about 2,000 sq. ft. of open-concept, well-insulated house, in the area around the Great Lakes.

o j

i'm not sure you can get just a few panels and just for an occassional use and make it worth while for the cost. we are converting this fall or next spring to all solar but we are in orlando where it's very sunny 365 days a yr and since 2004 our power bill has tripled while our useage has gone down 40%.

we've been researching doing this for a few yrs and there is one company in the US that produces a new thin lightweight panel, last yr they had a tech breakthru and the costs of manufacturing the panels dropped 50%. of course they are a very hot commodity right now and are taking orders for next winter lol. costs for our whole house w/ back up storage battery will be $7000. our power bill averages $250 and that's w/ EVERY single thing unplugged during the day except the fridge and stand up freezer, EVERYTHING, w/ no heat or A/C running lol. so the costs will quickly be recouped in our situation. i probably would not do it in yours'.

if it's just for emergencies you might look into using a spare car battery w/ power inverter hooked up to a small electric heater. we have xtensive experience in living w/o power unfortunately but we never have it happen in winter, luckily only when we need a/c. i can deal w/ 120 in the house but not anything under 65! we have a generator (PIA) we got for a 24 day period in 2004 w/o power but for a day or two loss we use car batteries w/ a power inverter to run smaller appliances. i hope you find a solution for next winter. ~ liz

We have two gas fireplaces and they work just fine when the power is out. Each one has an electric fan, but we never use the fans because they're noisy. They work very well without the fan anyway, the radiant heat is adequate. I always think it is weird that they work in a power outage, because they both are hooked up to thermostats with electrical wires-but for some reason they work.

We have two wood burners.
One upstairs and one down.

Lori

I also thought about a wood burning stove, it would only be smokey when you open the door to put the wood in there, I could probably live with that.

We have a wood burning fireplace insert and have heated our house with wood for years. This is the first year we are total electric because of health reasons. We also have an electric generator and have had that a few years. We do have a good supply of wood on hand in case we have a power outage. I have cooked and baked in and on my fireplace insert.

We bought a wood stove insert this summer. It keeps the living room toasty. It keeps the rest of the downstairs warm enough that the heater doesn't kick on.

We also have a generator. It's dh's toy. We use it when we're camping. During last year's ice storm, we used it for a few hours to run a small heater and the refrigerator and my laptop.

We have a kerosene heater. Don't like it much, but LOVE it when it's needed. One of the houses we were in had gas logs. That worked great too. I want to get gas piped to my fireplace here.

It was getting mighty cold in Tulsa, during the December 2007 ice storm. We ran out of wood then.

I do have kerosene on hand this winter.

Moni

Any fuel burning stove inside a living space must be properly vented for safety, i.e., hooked up to a working chimney or certified flue pipe. One must never heat an enclosed space with a combustion device that is not vented. Those unvented kerosene burners are for use outside and in ventilted spaces like a garage. The combustion gases will get you! and if it did not, oxygen depletion would.

I was raised in a small farmhouse that did not have electricity until after I was 11 yrs old. It was heated with a wood burner with the heat distributed by radiation and natural convection - no fans. During the coldest part of winter, the living room stove plus the kitchen cooking stove were both fired.

Today, I have a friend who augments his heat with a small wood burner and it is very effective. His burner is of simple design without fans.

A fireplace of conventional construction is a poor space heater. Most of the heat goes up the chimney. A few firepalces have heat exchanger air channel built into the brickwork, and these are about 2 times more effective as an ordinary fireplace. Some designs have a fan to help.

The next class of fireplace has a metal insert with airways and fan. These are the most effective of fireplace designs, but must be inspected on a rigorous schedule to insure there has not been a burn-through to the airway. A carbon-monoxide detector should be employed in the room with a firelace insert.

A wood/coal burner is much more efficient than fireplaces. Similar stoves using natural gas or propane may be installed in place of a wood burner. Check you local codes for flue construction and materials.

In extreme cold, say -20 F, propane stored in an outside tank may not provide enough pressure to operate properly.

When we lived in our old house, we put in a wood burner. The house had all electric heat. The woodburner had a fan on it, but if the electric went out, we still had heat, it just didn't spread as far. The house was a split level (some call it a tri-level) and we cut small square holes in the bedroom floors and put a register grate over them. That let the heat rise and kept the upstairs nicely warm, until the fire was almost out!

Now, we have a generator big enough to actually run the furnace, if need be. DH is an electrician, so knows how to configure the wiring to hook the two together. That generator has saved the basement a number of times when the power went out. It kept the sump pump running! If you already have a fireplace, I think the woodburner insert and a cord of wood would be your best bet. Have someone experieced install it and inspect the chimney to make sure that the flu lining is heavy enough. DO NOT burn Christmas boxes and wrapping paper in it! DH decided to get rid of the wrapping that way, as it is burnable, but did too much at once. We ended up with a chimney fire!

If the flu is drafting correctly, you shouldn' get much for smoke coming back into the house when you open the doors to put more wood in.

Tami

Thanks for all the replies. Tami, I don't have an existing fireplace so it would all have to be installed.

Kath, DH' parents had a "Ben Franklin" stove in the basement of their house. Its a free standing black heating stove, looks kind of like a fireplace insert. They had a stove pipe going from it to the chimney of the upstairs fireplace, which they couldn't use because the chimney wasn't high enough to vent it correctly, but it worked fine for the BF stove. You could get one of those and have it installed with just a stove pipe type chimney thru the wall and up the outside of the house. It would be a whole lot cheaper to do it that way than it would to have a regular fireplace in, then buy the insert, ect. It wouldn't heat the whole house, but it would certainly heat a few rooms. They had an open basement (finished except laundry/canning area), and it heated it nicely. Rancy style house.

Tami