One thing I recommend when buying a pellet stove is checking how the pellets arrive at the burn pot. A drop feed auger is better than one that just pushes the pellets to the pot. I have the latter, my parents have the former. BIG difference in maintenance!! The drop feeder needs cleaned maybe once a week. The push feed needs cleaned daily. If I would have known that earlier, I would not have bought this stove. I purchased it at Lowes. It was around $1200 after I purchased all the other kits ( chimney, fresh air intake kit, etc.), I also installed it myself. Unless you are installing this into an existing chimney, I recommend having it installed. You really need to have experience in room remodeling because it is a lot of work making the hole(s) in the wall. Home Depot and Lowes purchase low end stoves, so I do not recommend them. I have had issues with mine every year since I purchased it. It is and Englander Stove model 25-PDVC. I have replaced several parts on it already due to frequent shut down errors. So far I have replaced three vaccuum/ shut down switches, an auger, an auger motor and several heat gaskets. I'm not impressed. If you are not mechanically inclined, the task of repair could seem overwhelming. On a positive note, their customer service is very good. They can walk you through the steps to fix things, but it is very time consuming and the parts are not cheap. My advice is find a local dealer that installs and services their stoves. That way you know you have backup. Plus most of these stores will buy quality products because they can't afford to be making a lot of house calls for stove repair! :) Plan on spending close to $2000 minimum. That is the price of a small mid range stove. I have seen them go as high as $5000. With the price of oil and nat. gas on the increase, I think you will get a good return on your investment quickly. If you have some storage space, purchase pellets in the spring. You can sometimes get them for 1/2 price because they need to get rid of them. I saved $100 on a ton last spring at Home Depot. That sent the price per bag down to $2.72! Hard to beat that! Keep them dry and you're in business!

dvetter, I think that you can heat your area in your New Jersey location with a regular corn/grain-fired heating stove. I am a bit concerned about your 14 foot ceiling situation, but 60,000 BTU units can heat up to around 2,000 sq. ft. in the Great Lakes area, colder than your area, I think, if the residence has good circulation and insulation. There are a small number of companies in a cartel that run world grain, which make few reports, as most them are privately owned, not joint-stock companies like the oil companies, who have to publish much more of their information. The grain cartel has proven for many years that they are effective in keeping prices paid to farmers for their grains low. A number of users in this area find that they can heat using 150 - 200 bus. of corn per heating season. Not too shabby a price. But - you must operate it similarly to a wood stove, which needs managing oftener than once daily, so such a heater should be an alternative heat source - but you say that you have a furnace in place now, which can heat the place when you're away. They run somewhere around $2,500. in price, I think. Try www.grainstovesinc.com (or maybe ending ".ca"): my friend builds a high qualtiy stove. Good wishes as you seek an alternative heat source. joyful guy

Jim, I believe one of the false assumptions are the efficiency ratings of pellets stoves. They are not actually 84-87% efficient. (I have had several and love them, but those figures are manipulated- I will expand later). One of my biggest gripes with the industry is the rating of the stoves heating capacity using the btu input, in other words how many pounds of pellets it can burn in an hour multiplied by a generic (who knows what the manufactures use from company to company) btu per pound of pellet equals the btu rating of the stove. Most pellets stoves heat exchange efficiencies are in 45%-65% neighborhood, the dell point Europa is a notable exception that is into the +90%, and some of the real worst are even less than 45%. So how do the manufactures come up with 84-87% efficiency ? Well it is called an "overall efficiency" rating which includes; combustion efficiency, and some times electrical efficiency. For instance take a stove with 50% heat exchange efficiency, 99% combustion efficiency, and 99% electrical efficiency you would have an overall efficiency rating 83%. If that same stove was rated at 30,000 btu's you would only realize 15,000 worth of heat when turned all the way up. So I have owned 4 stoves this season of a quest for the most efficient, and my Harman advance seems to be the best so far, it has an extra heat exchanger on the back wall of the unit and even at full tilt the exhaust pipe is only at about 170 degrees, and the volume of air exiting the exhaust is very low, fair less then the heat exchanger. Mulesrider, It sounds sound like your Harman is having an efficiency issue, I think your dealer led you astray to say 1.5- 2 tons. I live in central PA and I will use about 3 tons this season for a pretty tight 1200 square foot house @ 73 in the living room 68 in the bedrooms. On an average cold day I will use about 50lbs a day. A few nights a it went down to 2 degrees with a 30mph wind and I used about 50lbs in 12 hours through the night, but it held the temp perfectly. If you have a Harman p38 you do not have a room temp sensor probe, however you do have you do have and exhaust temp probe, and from two of your comments it sound like that may be malfunctioning. 1.-The ash pan may not hold an entire ton worth of ash but it should be close, the fact that you say it is not even close makes me think the stove is over feeding, or not fulling burning the fuel. 2. The amount of fuel you are using for a 1400 square foot house seems really high unless you are trying to heat the house from the basement. What ever your issue is it sounds it is combustion related. Harman dealers are like any other dealer network, there are good ones and bad ones. The fact that the dealer led you to believe that you could heat a 1400 square foot house all season on 1.5 tons leads me to believe either they don't know their product, or they lied. Either way they don't seem like a great dealer. The p38 is a great stove, in fact at about $1700 new you could not find a better stove at the price point IMO. Sounds like yours need a repair. Savings, I had electric base-board heat, my savings (in reality not theory based on last year) will be about $600, but I am keeping my house at 74 degrees rather than 67 (new born in the house). If I tried to keep my house at 74 with electric I would guess my savings to be closer to $1000, and that is not counting the 20% electric rate increase this year, that would get my potential savings closer to $1200. Further, I have bought my pellets at winter prices ($215 ton), I will pre-buy this year for about $165/ton, putting my total savings over $1300/season.

As far as how much the stoves can go down in the "off-season" depends on many factors. If there is a discontinued model, it will go cheaper. On others, it just depends on how motivated the dealer is or maybe there is a stove in a particular color that they want to clear out. Mostly, the off-season is best for scheduling the installation and ordering any parts. That's probably where you will save the most money. Maybe they can even throw in installation for free if they don't discount the stove. There is more bargaining room on everything when they have more time. As far as the motor and boards on the Harman, I only ever replaced one board, but I am convinced the owner of the stove messed it up (there were other issues with this guy). I never replaced a motor or even a blower, even on my own stove. There is fan noise with all pellet stoves and I would always recommend to people that it not be put in the TV room. It seems to bother some people more than others. If you are sensitive to sounds it will bother you. It is kind of like a range hood fan on low all the time.