# 12 VOLT DC PELLET STOVES can run for days from a car or marine battery backup.



## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

I post this because i know that a lot of people think pellet stoves are no good because the dont work without electricity; WELL, NOW THEY DO, from your car battery.


These pellet stoves are marketed as "BATERY BACK UP PELLET STOVES"
a stupid and misleading term some pr jerk thought up.

 The 120 volt ac variable speed combustion chamber fan is replaced by the same fan in 12 volts dc rating.

 The 120 volt ac variable speed room air circulator fan motor is replaced by the same motor with a 12 volt dc rating.

The 120 volt pellet auger feed motor is replaced by the same motor with a 12 volt dc rating.

 The ac line cord, still there in the back of stove , feeds a 6 amp auto battery charger to power the 3 motors i just mentioned above.

The touch pad computer is still there, but now rated to opperate on 12 volts dc and powered from the battery charger through a filtering circuit.

A new feature is the positive and negative bananna pin sockets in the back of the stove and the 
6 ft cord with battery clamps  for both top and side terminal car batteries.

All the above 12 volt dc motors were selected for the least power consumpation of compeating 12 volt motors available.

The result was a power consumption of 27 watts, about equal to having only one of your tail lights on, on your car.

They length of opperation you can expect during a power outage is mainly determined by how big of a car battery you hook the stove up to.

Will also run on a motorcycle battery or lawn tractor battery, but only for 12 or 13 hours.

The auto ignite feature is still  powered by 120 volt ac, and so you will have to buy starter pellets and manually ignite the fire pot during an outage .

This means that 
the wall thermostat, if you get/have one, will not be able to re ignite the stove during an outage , but will turn on the blowers, just no fire until you lite it manually. 


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 Also, i might add: you can power a 120 volt pellet stove from your car battery by hooking up an 12 volt dc to 120 volt ac inverter, of the proper wattage to satisfy your pellet stove. However
this hook up will not run as long as a pellet stove designed with low wattage 12 volt dc motors.
The wattage rating of the 120 volt pellet stove motors was not a consideration in their selection.
back then , they only looked at price vs lifespan of motor.


so, you can power up your ac pellet stove during an outage with a car battery & inverter, but dont be suprised when the battery goes dead between 3 to 7 hours of opperation


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## begreen (Oct 27, 2007)

This is just wrong bad math. And the Thelin stove is not new. It's looks are an acquired taste and not for everyone.  The Thelin company is pretty clear on their website about power consumption. As I posted in the Cath's thread:

 Last I checked, car batteries were no where near 900+ amp hours it would take to run the dc blower on a Thelin pellet stove for 400hrs. According to Thelin, their stove will run almost a week on a 200amp deep cycle marine battery. That would be a 4D, which is a really big battery and expensive relative to a std. auto battery.

http://www.apexbattery.com/upg-group-4d-agm-marine-battery-marine-batteries.html


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## jtp10181 (Oct 27, 2007)

Did he say what stove he is talking about in that giant ramble?

Sounds like the Mt Vernon AE, and its been out for a while now.


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

dear be green ,
I definatly am not talking about a handcrafted therin gnome or parlor model stove. they are way 2 expensive for my taste. almost up to 5 figures, id bet.

 I am talking about a 1800.oo easyfire model ef3801G
which is new and mass produced not hand made like the therin.

BUT 400 hr would indeed require a deep cycle marine battery, but you really dont need one.
just use your car battery and stick a $30.oo jc whitney solar cell panel on it for recharging
during daylight hours.
If you are a 2 car family, someone could go to the nearest gas station and buy whatever extra battery or used battery the service station had in stock. That way ,you could be charging one while using the other.For a quick charge , you could start up the second car,take its charged battery out and put in the stove battery for recharging and run the stove on the second car's battery.

and for motor coaches or house trailers, this is the cat's nip!

did i mention the stove only wieghs 125 lbs and puts out 28,000 btu from the heat exchanger.
firebox btu is higher.

things are not so  bad as you make it seem.

lets say you might get 100 hr out of a standard car battery. that is 4 days run time non stop.
surely within 4 days either the power comes back on or you can get a ride to the store and pick up a extra battery if need be or  have your neighbor jump start your car and put the stove battery back in the car for a 2 hour charge.

These are emergency options we are speaking of, which may never happen or if they do,maybe once every 6 years , if that.

i am not recommending this stove to the recluse who lives 100 miles past the end of the last road.


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

jtp , i could have said the whole thing in a few sentances, and the average consumer would have no idea of how a pellet stove opperated.

now at least, they know a pellet stove has 3 motors and what each of them do.

no good deed goes unpunished.

The more info you impart, the more words it takes.

I know a crazy person that rambles on for upwards of a hour & gets mad if you dont let him,.

 about the x's on his palms and how he sold his sold to the devil.

I told him the devil was looking for him because he wanted a refund!

now that is seriously real rambling, not what i said is not.


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## jtp10181 (Oct 27, 2007)

Just this week I ripped a pellet insert down to its guts and put it back together again. I think I know how they operate.

But I know what you mean, not myself, but others will know how it operates.

BTW could you make your signature like... 5 lines, use commas instead of new lines for all the stuff in there.


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## begreen (Oct 27, 2007)

eernest4 said:
			
		

> BUT 400 hr would indeed require a deep cycle marine battery, but you really dont need one.
> just use your car battery and stick a $30.oo jc whitney solar cell panel on it for recharging
> during daylight hours.
> 
> ...



Recharging, via any means could give all winter operation. The title says up 400hrs on 1 car battery during an outage.  That's just wrong. 

A car battery (say group 24) is about 70 amps, but you can't use all of that without risking destroying the battery. So say you can use 60% safely before recharging. That gives 42 amps, or about 20 hrs run time. Not several days. A marine battery is the way to go. They are designed for deeper discharge cycles and are made in larger ampacities.

As to recharging, that is a good idea, unless the outage is widespread and during a blizzard. No sun for the panel then and no gas for the car or truck to spare either because the pumps are out. This is what it was like for us last Dec.


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

well, in that situation , a wood stove is really the best way to go,no doubt. But many people i have talked to wont even consider a wood stove because of feeding the baby. And they are right about that. when I m beat, its a godsend to push the start button and go to bed.
I have both wood & pellet. Many will only have pellet & if there is a doable way 4 then 2 opperate it in an outage, they should be allowed to know of it.

I'm a bit different that the average guy, I keep a generator, fuel, keep my car tank full & have both wood & pellet. I buy pellets by the ton in aug.

I didnt realize a group 24 was only 70 amps, i remember looking at one that said 350 cold cranking amps, but that must be a different type of rating, just turning over the motor 4 a min.
or two. you are talking continious per hour total = 70 accumulative.

I never bother 2 research batteries, just buy the $35.oo at the first sign of trouble & forget about it.

well something for them in an emergency is better than nothing & having 2 evac to a shelter.


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## webbie (Oct 27, 2007)

In the 30 years I have been selling stoves.....the longest the power has ever gone out for (anywhere I lived) was 4 days....and that was not in winter. During the great ice storm (94 or 96?) we had rolling blackouts and maybe 2 days without power. 

So it could be said that there is a very small chance that we will be in "survival" mode, and therefore the fact that a pellet stoves uses electric should not be a big deal. BUT, having at the least a UPS backup system and an inverter to hook to your car battery (that's the lowest price backup) is not a bad idea. 

In my opinion, the noise of the electric in most pellet stoves is a bigger pain than the fact that they don't work in a power failure.


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## wilbilt (Oct 27, 2007)

eernest4 said:
			
		

> The 120 volt ac variable speed combustion chamber fan is replaced by the same fan in 12 volts dc rating.
> 
> The 120 volt ac variable speed room air circulator fan motor is replaced by the same motor with a 12 volt dc rating.
> 
> ...



Uh...my 1994 Trail Blazer pellet stove has all that (except the touchpad...which you can keep).

What's the big deal?


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

thanks for the nice eddit, I only wish I had thought 2 do it myself, great improvement.


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## wilbilt (Oct 27, 2007)

eernest4 said:
			
		

> thanks for the nice eddit, I only wish I had thought 2 do it myself, great improvement.



My edit was in the interest of brevity. Did I leave anything pertinent out?


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

wilbiult,

go on line and try to find a 12 volt dc pellet stove someplace to buy. 

its almost easier getting the govt to admit ufo's exist.

It took me 6 hours off intensive internet searching using 3 differnt search engines to find only 2
brands and only one was affordable by the average man. 

i guess they sure dont try much at all to advertise them
if it takes 6 hours of intensive searching to find just one.


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## eernest4 (Oct 27, 2007)

no, you did it perfectly. thanks great job. I couldnt have done it as well.

The 400 hours thing was right off the stove dealer's web site and I just took his add man word for it without researching battery capacities.
It occurs to me that someone should make a 13.8 volt pedal generator for car batteries in a power outage situation , but i suspose there is too little real world market for such a thing.
only people with forsight and extra cash would buy one.

if they made them small, every one could stick one in the trunk.


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## stoveguy2esw (Oct 28, 2007)

actually a dc powered pellet stove wouldnt be too difficult to build, hard part would be figuring out the control for the air and auger setups cfm is cfm, and auger timing wouldnt need to change, a "delay relay" for the auger  and a rheostatic control for the exhaust blower, and another for the room air blower, and there ya go. biggest deal would be a reliable power source, either a converter for dc from ac. like a battery trickle charger would probably work as long as the motors and blowers did not pull too hard for the charger to keep up with.then run on batteries when ac isnt available. otherwise, the stove would be limited in run time , or the user would have to monitor and switch batteries to keep the unit running. wouldnt be practical for an auto light function , im not sure a dc version is available. 

would be very doable, i mean this is just a 5 minute off the cuff musing from me and its basics are worked out, but its never that simple


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## wilbilt (Oct 28, 2007)

I'm not an engineer, but it occurs to me that it may just not be very efficient to run a pellet stove from a low voltage power source.
If such stoves are not readily available for sale now, there is probably a reason for it.

In the case of my old stove, it does have a 12V connection, but I don't know what kind of current draw it has running on 12V or what the runtime expectation would be from a typical RV/Marine deep-cycle battery. This information might be in the operation manual, but I have been unable to locate one.

With a fully charged battery, I expect it would run for an hour or two. As voltage decreases, current draw increases for a given output. I admit I am pretty rusty regarding the properties of Ohm's law, but if a stove running on 120V at a given output draws 3A of current, the same stove running on 12V at the same output would be drawing closer to 30A. Someone operating a pedal-powered generator supplying that much current would not likely need the heat from the stove to stay warm, as they would be generating plenty of heat on their own.

That being said, I think it would be possible to design such a stove to require less electrical power to operate. Using natural draft would require less power for combustion air, and the auger feed could conceivably be powered by a spring wound device. Using small, efficient fans for convection air and draft assistance when needed could increase runtime, provided you remembered to wind your auger spring every x number of hours.

I have some experienc with UPS units powering servers and network devices. In order to provide considerable runtime during a power outage, the UPS needs to have adequate capacity. In my experience, this means large UPS units full of expensive batteries that need to be replaced every 2-3 years. If the batteries are not replaced when necessary, they can swell and begin gassing, which creates a secondary fire hazard.


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