ECO Bricks, Do You use them ?
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I use them all the time though not that fond of the ones from TSC that are large. The eco brick bio brick and hot brick. True Value here has hot bricks and they work very well for me because of the small fire box and short chimney though the chimney does draw well. I put either 6 or 7 in with a little kindling between them on a cold start and they take off well take 5 to 10 minutes to get rolling along with secondarys by 30 minutes stove at 450 and the next 30 minutes up to 650 to to 730 on the stove top and hangs there for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours then slowly goes down to 450 and hangs there for the rest of the burn. The old plaster walls really suck up the heat and release it back into the room so basically loading BTU into the walls so the very hot stove does not overheat the house all that bad. If I need more heat let the coals burn down for about an hour or two then reload 6 in a pattern easier to load with fire place tongs as the stove is still 400. They take off easily and secondarys in 10 to 15 minutes. I have not needed more than 2 burns in one day. The down sides they are expensive at 7 dollars a day and don't walk too far away from them until well into the burn. The big thing to watch is the time before the fully closed and on secondarys. I have had a couple of times only away for under 5 minutes and thought the stack probe died on me then realized it wound all the way around to 50 but actually 1200. Funny thing is that is the first time the Rutland magnetic thermometer read well into the safe burn zone.
To sum up my thoughts
Pros
Clean dry easy to load give plenty of heat and can store indoors
Cons
Cos and have to stay on top of them until well into burn cyclet
To sum up my thoughts
Pros
Clean dry easy to load give plenty of heat and can store indoors
Cons
Cos and have to stay on top of them until well into burn cyclet
I used to burn wood, not much free wood in the area so it's all bought, and about 230-250/cord. I decided to buy pellets after reading about pellet boxes, and built a pellet box. They burn well, but not very hot. Still minimal ash which I can't complain about. Then the hardware store gets hot bricks in and being a frequent shopper, they say take 2 packs of these and try them out and let us know what you think.
Tossed 5 on hot coals 8hr after lighting 1/3rd bag of pellets. HOLY HOT VERY FAST. Had I not checked on it 15min later, I left my dial at 8. i would have very easily had overburn and could have created a fire hazard. It had topped 700F in a very short time. I dialed all the way back down to 2. During the initial burn be sure to keep an eye on them. Overcooked and burnt those 5 and the stove was down to 400F in roughly 5 hours. I think I burned to hot to fast though and lost a lot.
Tossed 4 in at 7pm and the stove was back at 700F in about 15 minutes. I will let them burn until 11pm before tossing 3 on overnight. Still trying to figure out how to control the air for these.
I'm going to buy a pallet this weekend most likely. $300/ton and infinitely easier than wood.
Tossed 5 on hot coals 8hr after lighting 1/3rd bag of pellets. HOLY HOT VERY FAST. Had I not checked on it 15min later, I left my dial at 8. i would have very easily had overburn and could have created a fire hazard. It had topped 700F in a very short time. I dialed all the way back down to 2. During the initial burn be sure to keep an eye on them. Overcooked and burnt those 5 and the stove was down to 400F in roughly 5 hours. I think I burned to hot to fast though and lost a lot.
Tossed 4 in at 7pm and the stove was back at 700F in about 15 minutes. I will let them burn until 11pm before tossing 3 on overnight. Still trying to figure out how to control the air for these.
I'm going to buy a pallet this weekend most likely. $300/ton and infinitely easier than wood.
NJ_Burner08002
Member
Where in Eastern PA did you get them. I live in NJ but travel a lot to Eastern PA. For instance going to Harrisburg tomorrow.
I'm by King of Prussia. My local hardware store is privately owned by some friends of the family. They recently franchised with Do It Best. Here is their store:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/C...63,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x45cd1f285a9a493c
NJ_Burner08002
Member
I use the big blocks from TSC. Redstone load 2 north south and a split east west with fire starter in the middle. I do this just to get the party started since my wood isint fully seasoned. This helps tremendous.
No need to reload anymore bricks after that the coals are good and hot and make the splits burn well
No need to reload anymore bricks after that the coals are good and hot and make the splits burn well
Lots of them, was just in today and they gave me to packs of 15 to try out as they wanted a review. They just got them in and have been selling but not to people they knew, so they couldn't ask for a reccomendation. I'm their guinea pig with stuff. At this point, I'm still playing iwth stacking in different ways and varying the burn rate with the dial on the front to see if I can get a good 8hr burn and 1-2hr smolder to last a full day at work, but they seem to be working well.
ridemgis
Feeling the Heat
I've burned a couple tons of BioBricks and ENVI bricks. If you want a ton of heat fast these will do it. If you want a long, steady burn with decent heat output, they will do that too. Much of how they burn is based on how you place them in the stove. Put in a bunch, loosely packed and you'll have an overfire. Stack them tightly and you'll have coals in the morning for an easy restart. And in most all cases, a single brick or three will not impress from a cold start.
Many evenings on coming home to a cold stove and house, I loosely stack six 8" envi blocks in three layers alternating EW & NS. I put one quarter of a super cedar on top, light it, and then leave the door cracked for five to ten minutes and I'm good for several hours of good heat. When the flame is gone, I open up the primary and get another hour out the fast burning coals.
If the price were comparable to firewood I might burn these exclusively.
My two cents on the subject,
PJ
NJ_Burner08002
Member
They are these:
(broken link removed)
It's 5x3, they are deceptively heavy. I'd guess each brick is roughly 5"x2"x3", give or take. A pallet of 990 bricks is just shy of a ton for $300, $6.99 for an individual pack of 15.
Please don't buy them all, I still haven't bought my stock yet
(broken link removed)
It's 5x3, they are deceptively heavy. I'd guess each brick is roughly 5"x2"x3", give or take. A pallet of 990 bricks is just shy of a ton for $300, $6.99 for an individual pack of 15.
Please don't buy them all, I still haven't bought my stock yet
NJ_Burner08002
Member
Haha ok. I only say because there's some people in the area that are buying out all the little guys only to turn around and resell them at a marked up price because they have the corner on the market. They call most places in a 60mi radius 2-3x a week, buy on the phone, and send a truck for them. Mostly pellets but I wouldn't be surprised if htey branched into hot bricks.
Thanks for the tip on these Eco Bricks. I'm going to give them a try. Menards sells them for $3.29 a pack, but my stove dealer sells them for around $225 a ton (pallet of 100 packs). From what I've read you have to use at least 6 bricks, tightly stacked, to get the most efficient burn. Looking forward to trying these out.
NJ_Burner08002
Member
I stopped by your store. I picked up 150 of them. The guy said he has a whole trailer full but he wasn't sure he would be able to get more. They certainly burn well, I have 2 in there now. Nice product. Thanks for the tip. Nice store.
Thanks, glad it worked out. They have a lot, but like pellets, they're a bit questionable as to supply.
I like htem, they burn well, but I've encountered something. When they're done burning or giving off significant heat, there's still a hard shell., which can get in the way when trying to stack new ones. It'd be easier if it left a small pile of embers to light the next stack.
NJ_Burner08002
Member
eclecticcottage
Minister of Fire
We did the first year-mixed with bought "seasoned" wood to help keep temps reasonable. Now that we've got our own seasoned wood, we don't use them-no need. We might still buy a couple packs to use in case we both got sick and didn't want to go out to bring in wood, Haven't gotten around to that and they're probably sold out now.
NJ_Burner08002
Member
Poindexter
Minister of Fire
I have 1800# of them to play with this year, local factory about 20 miles down the road, I doubt they "export" to the lower 48. These guys: http://www.superiorpelletfuels.com/
The very worst time of year to buy cordwood is March. If you run out of wood here in Feb you have not planned well and are going to have to open your wallet. I just bought a truck load of logs in October for $975 that was sold to me as "5 cords" but is likely to split out to more like 7 cords. Call it 6 cords for 975, I paid $162/ cord for green logs.
To be sure I had to buck them and still have to split and season them, but on the SPF homepage linked above the only folks who really pay $330/ cord to make bio- logs look like a good deal are poor planners. I haven't had to pay $4/ gallon for #2 oil yet neither, my last fill was $3.74/ gallon. And my stove is way better than 50 percent efficient.
I have burnt about ten of the bio logs so far. As above they don't light as easily as cord wood, but light right off on a good bed of coals. With the main stove door cracked open they do indeed burn nuclear hot. With the door shut and the cat engaged (BK Ashford 30 here) they settle right down and burn a good long time for me, very fine ash when they are done.
These ones I can get are the kind that expand lengthwise when burning. The directions say to lay them in the firebox parallel to the glass and when I didn't that one time the end of the log got to pushing up against the glass hard enough for me to open the door and take part of the flaming log out. Throwing half a bio-log out in the snow in the yard seemed like it would be a lot cheaper than replacing the glass in the stove door.
I can't see a difference in my exhaust plume opacity running a bunch of bio-logs versus running a box full of my seasoned birch or spruce. I am in an EPA "non-attainment" area for air quality. It looks like when the air pollution police get here it's going to be curbside measurement of exhaust plume opacity that determines if the homeowner gets a ticket or not. As proposed we have six minutes to get from cold stove to plume opacity under 60%. On low air quality days if will likely be six minutes to get exhaust plume opacity to under 40%.
What I see when my cat equipped BK Ashford is running good is zero percent opacity. Right at the chimney outlet I see nothing, zilch, nada, about a foot away a white puffy cloud forms, should be nothing but water vapor condensing as it cools. I have been practicing even though the rules haven't been finalized yet, never mind have an effective date; but what I have been doing meets the proposed air quality rules.
I fill my Ashford every 12 hours, the cat has been hot enough to be active, continuously, for over a month now. If it is cold out, I run the stove on 2/3 for twelve hours and have a couple inches of coals in the bottom. If it is "warm" out I run the thermostat at 1/3 and have a stove box about half full of burning wood after twelve hours. Either way I disengage the cat, fill the box to full with more cordwood or bio-logs, close the door, re-engage the cat and the exhaust plume is back to zero opacity by the time I can get my boots back on and get out in the yard to look.
To be sure my eyeball is not an EPA calibrated test device. And my cord wood measures pretty much 11-16%MC per gizmo, I have found a few pieces of 18-20% MC here and there. Having said that, I don't see that running bio-logs in a cat stove is any cleaner than running good dry wood in a cat stove.
Pricey little SOBs, but they don't take up very much room for their inherent heat value, and they are dry enough to burn good at time of purchase.
The very worst time of year to buy cordwood is March. If you run out of wood here in Feb you have not planned well and are going to have to open your wallet. I just bought a truck load of logs in October for $975 that was sold to me as "5 cords" but is likely to split out to more like 7 cords. Call it 6 cords for 975, I paid $162/ cord for green logs.
To be sure I had to buck them and still have to split and season them, but on the SPF homepage linked above the only folks who really pay $330/ cord to make bio- logs look like a good deal are poor planners. I haven't had to pay $4/ gallon for #2 oil yet neither, my last fill was $3.74/ gallon. And my stove is way better than 50 percent efficient.
I have burnt about ten of the bio logs so far. As above they don't light as easily as cord wood, but light right off on a good bed of coals. With the main stove door cracked open they do indeed burn nuclear hot. With the door shut and the cat engaged (BK Ashford 30 here) they settle right down and burn a good long time for me, very fine ash when they are done.
These ones I can get are the kind that expand lengthwise when burning. The directions say to lay them in the firebox parallel to the glass and when I didn't that one time the end of the log got to pushing up against the glass hard enough for me to open the door and take part of the flaming log out. Throwing half a bio-log out in the snow in the yard seemed like it would be a lot cheaper than replacing the glass in the stove door.
I can't see a difference in my exhaust plume opacity running a bunch of bio-logs versus running a box full of my seasoned birch or spruce. I am in an EPA "non-attainment" area for air quality. It looks like when the air pollution police get here it's going to be curbside measurement of exhaust plume opacity that determines if the homeowner gets a ticket or not. As proposed we have six minutes to get from cold stove to plume opacity under 60%. On low air quality days if will likely be six minutes to get exhaust plume opacity to under 40%.
What I see when my cat equipped BK Ashford is running good is zero percent opacity. Right at the chimney outlet I see nothing, zilch, nada, about a foot away a white puffy cloud forms, should be nothing but water vapor condensing as it cools. I have been practicing even though the rules haven't been finalized yet, never mind have an effective date; but what I have been doing meets the proposed air quality rules.
I fill my Ashford every 12 hours, the cat has been hot enough to be active, continuously, for over a month now. If it is cold out, I run the stove on 2/3 for twelve hours and have a couple inches of coals in the bottom. If it is "warm" out I run the thermostat at 1/3 and have a stove box about half full of burning wood after twelve hours. Either way I disengage the cat, fill the box to full with more cordwood or bio-logs, close the door, re-engage the cat and the exhaust plume is back to zero opacity by the time I can get my boots back on and get out in the yard to look.
To be sure my eyeball is not an EPA calibrated test device. And my cord wood measures pretty much 11-16%MC per gizmo, I have found a few pieces of 18-20% MC here and there. Having said that, I don't see that running bio-logs in a cat stove is any cleaner than running good dry wood in a cat stove.
Pricey little SOBs, but they don't take up very much room for their inherent heat value, and they are dry enough to burn good at time of purchase.
samfatboy
Member
I'm a new member to this site, although I have lurked for a while. I have an Appalachian 52 Bay insert that I bought back in 2008 when I decided I was tired of giving all my money for oil to people in places that don't have the same set of values I have.
My house is a center wall colonial with a fireplace in the family room on the northeast side of the house, and the bedrooms over the living room on the southwest side of the house. So getting heat from the fireplace to the bedrooms has been a challenge. My oil burner is a forced air system, so I have kept the fan turning to circulate the fireplace heat, but it is not the most efficient system in the world.
At first I burned only cord wood, which I would purchase locally. Slab wood from a local saw mill was the best, but they stopped cutting it down to fit into the stove. I got burned on several bad cords from local sellers and decided to look into Bio Bricks. BT Pellet here in Connecticut sells several brands of compressed bricks, and I have tried them all. For a consistent burn, the Bio Bricks have been best in my stove.
For me time is money. There is a lot of free wood available to me, but if I consider the time it takes me to cut it, stack and store it, at my hourly wage it costs me way more than $300 a cord. Even having cord wood delivered requires me to stack it, store it properly, and protect it from the elements, which still drives the cost to well over $300 per cord. I can buy the Bio Bricks for $240 to $250 per ton, pick them up in my chevy 3500 vandura, and have them neatly stacked in my garage in under two hours. I don't have to deal with bugs, snakes, wolf spiders, rotting wood, or trudging out in the snow to get more wood.
My first year of using my stove, I went from burning 1300 gallons of oil to burning 700 gallons, and 2 cords of wood. At the price of $2.75 per gallon in 2008/2009, I saved half the cost of my stove installation in the first year. The stove has more than doubled it's cost in savings over the past 6 years.
This year, with the prospect of oil hitting $4.00 per gallon, I decided I needed to get a stove for the living room, and get completely (for the most part) off of oil. So I bought an Englander 25pdvc pellet stove in early September. You can thank me for the recent fall in petroleum prices! So far in October and Nov I have burned 1 ton total of pellets and bricks.
This week is the real test. It has been an unseasonably cold late November here in Connecticut, with today's high only 34 degrees, and tonight's low to be around 12. Last night's low was 20. The past two days I have burned about 60 pounds of fuel per day while keeping my home at about 70 degrees. I figure January and February may average around 80 pounds per day, March and April probably more like 30 pounds per day. On the spreadsheet that works out to about 8440 pounds total, or about 4 1/4 tons -- so I will round up to 5 tons. At $250 per ton that is $1250 versus at least 1300 gallons of oil at $2.85 per gallon -- assuming ISIS doesn't overrun Baghdad -- or $3705.
My Englander should pay for itself in the first year! And the bags of pellets tell me that burning pellet fuel is green and CO2 neutral. I don't believe a word of it, but if it keeps Al Gore happy. . .
All the tips I have found here on this forum are greatly appreciated, and I will follow up with how well my game plan works out.
My house is a center wall colonial with a fireplace in the family room on the northeast side of the house, and the bedrooms over the living room on the southwest side of the house. So getting heat from the fireplace to the bedrooms has been a challenge. My oil burner is a forced air system, so I have kept the fan turning to circulate the fireplace heat, but it is not the most efficient system in the world.
At first I burned only cord wood, which I would purchase locally. Slab wood from a local saw mill was the best, but they stopped cutting it down to fit into the stove. I got burned on several bad cords from local sellers and decided to look into Bio Bricks. BT Pellet here in Connecticut sells several brands of compressed bricks, and I have tried them all. For a consistent burn, the Bio Bricks have been best in my stove.
For me time is money. There is a lot of free wood available to me, but if I consider the time it takes me to cut it, stack and store it, at my hourly wage it costs me way more than $300 a cord. Even having cord wood delivered requires me to stack it, store it properly, and protect it from the elements, which still drives the cost to well over $300 per cord. I can buy the Bio Bricks for $240 to $250 per ton, pick them up in my chevy 3500 vandura, and have them neatly stacked in my garage in under two hours. I don't have to deal with bugs, snakes, wolf spiders, rotting wood, or trudging out in the snow to get more wood.
My first year of using my stove, I went from burning 1300 gallons of oil to burning 700 gallons, and 2 cords of wood. At the price of $2.75 per gallon in 2008/2009, I saved half the cost of my stove installation in the first year. The stove has more than doubled it's cost in savings over the past 6 years.
This year, with the prospect of oil hitting $4.00 per gallon, I decided I needed to get a stove for the living room, and get completely (for the most part) off of oil. So I bought an Englander 25pdvc pellet stove in early September. You can thank me for the recent fall in petroleum prices! So far in October and Nov I have burned 1 ton total of pellets and bricks.
This week is the real test. It has been an unseasonably cold late November here in Connecticut, with today's high only 34 degrees, and tonight's low to be around 12. Last night's low was 20. The past two days I have burned about 60 pounds of fuel per day while keeping my home at about 70 degrees. I figure January and February may average around 80 pounds per day, March and April probably more like 30 pounds per day. On the spreadsheet that works out to about 8440 pounds total, or about 4 1/4 tons -- so I will round up to 5 tons. At $250 per ton that is $1250 versus at least 1300 gallons of oil at $2.85 per gallon -- assuming ISIS doesn't overrun Baghdad -- or $3705.
My Englander should pay for itself in the first year! And the bags of pellets tell me that burning pellet fuel is green and CO2 neutral. I don't believe a word of it, but if it keeps Al Gore happy. . .
All the tips I have found here on this forum are greatly appreciated, and I will follow up with how well my game plan works out.
How many BTU/ton any idea so I can add to the possibility for the bricks? Are they all the same? Trying to add to my database of different fuel vs. cost and effort. So far coal is winning
WriteNoob
Burning Hunk
Common parlance is that one ton of bricks is equal to one cord of hardwood, BTU-wise. Burn characteristics have been stated as somewhere between wood and coal. I don't know if they're assuming oak, for the wood, or some average. Unfortunately, I don't have hard data, only what is stated in adds and on the forums.
samfatboy
Member
My experience is that the BioBricks are equivalent to medium hardwood grade firewood for heat output and burn time. In my stove, oak slab wood burned the hottest and the longest, along with Fir, followed by oak and maple. Bio Bricks would be about equivalent to medium dry oak or very dry maple -- in my stove. I don't think a ton is quite equivalent to a full cord of good, dry oak -- probably about 85 or 90 percent - but that is a guess , I don't have any way to measure. For me it is more about time and convenience.
Right now my biggest concern is another apparent shortage of pellets for my new pellet stove. I was counting on using it to provide primary heat to our bedrooms, but all of the sudden, it got cold and they are hard to find right now. I have enough to last through December, but do not want to run out and not be able to find any like what happened to a lot of people last February - March around here. The bricks seem to be available though.
Right now my biggest concern is another apparent shortage of pellets for my new pellet stove. I was counting on using it to provide primary heat to our bedrooms, but all of the sudden, it got cold and they are hard to find right now. I have enough to last through December, but do not want to run out and not be able to find any like what happened to a lot of people last February - March around here. The bricks seem to be available though.
Poindexter
Minister of Fire
We run out of pellets up here _every_ winter. The turtles keep enough for a winter and a half in their garages, buy in the summer when pellet prices are low and have no idea how much pellets cost in Feb/Mar, because they aren't looking for any. The hares buy pellets one Prius load at a time and are caught short year after year after year.
Pound for pound should be the way to determine the heat value of pellet logs. It's all cellulose, same as balsa and fir and white oak. How many pounds of wood you got in that bio-log ought to tell you exactly how many BTUs are in it, once you correct for MC.
Coal is tough to beat on a $/BTU basis, and it is real easy to handle if you buy the right size lumps. In a well engineered correctly operated stove emissions can be very respectable ass/u/meing you keep the rain off your dry coal. The down side for me is common impurities like mercury that collect in the ash bin. If you're done making babies and have a coal mine less than 200 miles away it's probably worth considering.
I don't really want to think about my hourly rate for handling cordwood. But it does save me buying a gym membership, and splitting over the winter gets me outdoors a little bit at a time when it is too cold to wander very far from the house. And the savings off my oil bill go in my hunting/fishing account, real nice to put money in that account with three kids in college.
Pound for pound should be the way to determine the heat value of pellet logs. It's all cellulose, same as balsa and fir and white oak. How many pounds of wood you got in that bio-log ought to tell you exactly how many BTUs are in it, once you correct for MC.
Coal is tough to beat on a $/BTU basis, and it is real easy to handle if you buy the right size lumps. In a well engineered correctly operated stove emissions can be very respectable ass/u/meing you keep the rain off your dry coal. The down side for me is common impurities like mercury that collect in the ash bin. If you're done making babies and have a coal mine less than 200 miles away it's probably worth considering.
I don't really want to think about my hourly rate for handling cordwood. But it does save me buying a gym membership, and splitting over the winter gets me outdoors a little bit at a time when it is too cold to wander very far from the house. And the savings off my oil bill go in my hunting/fishing account, real nice to put money in that account with three kids in college.
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