My dad got me into pellet burning stoves. He has a Lennox, the self cleaning kind, and it seems to have held up well. He lives in the Northeast. I got a Quad Fire Santa Fe stove. I live in Ohio.
He has an abundance of pellet selection. I am fairly limited. The dealer gets one big order in late summer, and that's his whole inventory. You need to pre-order and have the space to store it if you want to be guaranteed supply. Home depot here doesn't sell pellets, and Lowes, which used to get several types, now only stocks one, and this year they were sold out in March, perpetually waiting for restock. The Quad will burn corn, but I was told by the dealer to stay away from the local corn sources because they aren't dried well and it will jam the stove.
The guy who says a Santa Fe will feed all kinds of pellets is misleading you. They are fussy as to pellet size and amount of fines. One year I got a 40 lbs via craigslist from a local guy. They were a lot of small fragments and the stove pretty much burned through them on "high" setting, but would die out if you tried to run it on low or medium. I had to sieve them through a mesh sac before I could get the stove to handle them.
While it was under warranty, I felt like there was very poor support. Everything was "well, you'll have to have a tech come out, and it'll cost you $X for the service visit plus $Y for the labor if it turns out to be consumables/cleaning/normal wear". At least for me, they were unhelpful about providing documentation of the mechanical systems, and as for the control circuitry, it is strictly a "black box" that can't be debugged. Parts via the dealer-distributor channel were expensive. Gaskets, which as "consumable" and theoretically have to be changed whenever you do a disassembly-type cleaning will run you $100+.
Also, as it says as part of the annual maintenance, you'll need to touch up paint a few parts. That means disassembling the thing, so you can paint it with high-temp spray paint. If you don't do that every season, your fire-pot clean out will start jamming up, and you need to break it free, and have a wire wheel handy to refinish it. You don't want to neglect this, or the plate may not fully close on you one day, leading to fire in the ash pan.
Now, on the plus side, the stove is not so complicated that you can't figure out a few things on your own. But at some point you'll be reading about this-or-that snap disk that needs to be reset because your fire ran too hot, and you'll have no idea where it is on the stove from the literature they provide you.
Anyway, after my experience with this Santa Fe, I'll be getting a gas stove next time around, my father's advice be jiggered...
(lifting weight is also good for bone density). If mobility issues already exist, should probably look at something that is less labor.
