Hi all, I wanted to get some opinions on my situation before we have to deal with any salespeople or spend any money.
We bought this house a year ago. It has a Harman Accentra pellet insert that was installed in the living room in 2006. We used it a little bit this winter just for entertainment purposes. While it was certainly convenient to just dump some pellets in and turn a dial, it was quite noisy and lacked a certain charm. From an emergency preparedness standpoint I am also not crazy about needing electricity to run AND a fuel source that must be bought from a store. It's also 18 years old so I'm not sure how much life expectancy it has left.
Should I replace this with a wood burning insert? Between our few acres of timber and occasional "free wood" facebook posts, I think I could effectively supply enough firewood for our needs. We would NOT be using this as a primary heat source, but I would probably use it as often as our wood supply would allow. I enjoy working outdoors and I enjoy building fires, though I've never had a wood burning stove before.
From a design standpoint, is there any reason to suspect compatibility issues with putting a wood burning insert in here? We did have a guy come out to clean/inspect the flue but the insert is mortared into the stone and he'd never seen a pellet insert so he would not clean it. He did say the flue looked very narrow but didn't have a lot of build-up. Will the carpet be an issue?
Anything else I need to consider? and any recommendations on a good insert? Ideally one we could claim the 30% credit on.
Thanks in advance for the guidance! Looking forward to learning more from this forum.
We bought this house a year ago. It has a Harman Accentra pellet insert that was installed in the living room in 2006. We used it a little bit this winter just for entertainment purposes. While it was certainly convenient to just dump some pellets in and turn a dial, it was quite noisy and lacked a certain charm. From an emergency preparedness standpoint I am also not crazy about needing electricity to run AND a fuel source that must be bought from a store. It's also 18 years old so I'm not sure how much life expectancy it has left.
Should I replace this with a wood burning insert? Between our few acres of timber and occasional "free wood" facebook posts, I think I could effectively supply enough firewood for our needs. We would NOT be using this as a primary heat source, but I would probably use it as often as our wood supply would allow. I enjoy working outdoors and I enjoy building fires, though I've never had a wood burning stove before.
From a design standpoint, is there any reason to suspect compatibility issues with putting a wood burning insert in here? We did have a guy come out to clean/inspect the flue but the insert is mortared into the stone and he'd never seen a pellet insert so he would not clean it. He did say the flue looked very narrow but didn't have a lot of build-up. Will the carpet be an issue?
Anything else I need to consider? and any recommendations on a good insert? Ideally one we could claim the 30% credit on.
Thanks in advance for the guidance! Looking forward to learning more from this forum.
