Rising oil and natural gas prices kindle interest in alternative fuel
By JoAnna Daemmrich Sun reporter Posted January 26 2006
E-mail story Print story Most e-mailed News on your cell RSS news feeds
PHOTO
Corn-burning heat stove See larger image (Sun photo by Christopher T. Assaf) Jan 13, 2006
PHOTO GALLERY The Day in Pictures
MOST E-MAILED (last 24 hours) 1. Clinics to open in some Publix stores 2. Crocodile commotion in Dania Beach 3. Architect gets resistance for energy-saving plan to build windmill in Fort Lauderdale 4. Every move you make ... they'll be watching you 5. Widow of Dr. Atkins donates $16,000 to students who refused to sell candy See the complete list ...
Subscribe today to the Sun-Sentinel and find out how to get one week extra! Click here or call 1-877-READ-SUN.
On chilly nights, after he tucks 3-year-old Grace into bed, Mark Flory turns up the heat the old-fashioned way. He checks the flame in the downstairs stove, lifts the lid and pours in a big bucket of dried corn.
It could be a scene from a century-old farmhouse on the prairie. But Flory, his wife and their little girl live far from the American heartland in a congested suburb inside the Capital Beltway.
Nevertheless, like a small but growing number of homeowners nationwide, the Florys are keeping their Takoma Park house cozy this winter by burning dried, shelled corn. They belong to a Takoma Park corn-buying cooperative that's quickly attracting new members: It boasts 33 families and a storage silo in town.
Fed up with high heating bills, some homeowners are shutting off their furnaces and switching to stoves that burn fuels earlier generations used: coal, wood, feed corn, even cherry pits.
"It's a lot cheaper than natural gas," says Flory, 48, a state and local liaison for the Environmental Protection Agency, who heated his two-story brick house last winter with nothing more than $360 worth of corn.
The year might have gotten off to a balmy start, but stove dealers were doing a brisk business even before sudden snow squalls blew through the region yesterday and a significant storm began blanketing Western Maryland. As much as 10 inches of snow was forecast by early today for some ridgetop areas.
It's not just environmentally minded folks who are turning to organic fuels. Last fall, as natural gas and oil prices soared in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, scores of worried homeowners around the country rushed to buy modern versions of the cast-iron stoves that first became popular during the 1970s energy crisis.
In Boyertown, Pa., near Philadelphia, Groff's Stove Shop doubled its sales of coal stoves, selling out all 40 by Christmas. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, Jerry and Betty Jackson's corn-stove dealership shipped 100 stoves to customers across the country; they're taking orders for next year. And in Western Maryland, Ed Bodmer sold off his floor models of stoves that burn wood pellets - uniformly sized chunks of compressed wood that burn far more efficiently than logs.
"They can't build them fast enough this year," says Bodmer, who had to return a few down payments when stoves took too long to arrive, something he hadn't done since he opened in 1978. Bodmer expects to get his first shipment of pellet stoves in a month but already has a waiting list.
Manufacturers are busy ramping up production of the pellet, coal and corn stoves, which cost $1,800 to $4,000. In Maryland, as in many areas, wood pellets are hard to find.
"Before we could get them, everyone else did," says Bob Shaffer, a computer technician in Cresaptown, who searched for weeks before finding pellets, typically made from waste wood such as sawdust or saplings cut by road crews.
He wound up paying $180 a ton, $30 more than in the past. But that hasn't dampened Shaffer's enthusiasm for the pellet stove he installed when he threw out his oil furnace eight years ago.
"I've always loved a fireplace," he says. "Here, you've got the look of a fire, but the fuel is convenient. You just dump it in. You can start [the stove] in a couple of minutes and adjust it from blazing to almost nothing."
Once rarely found except in cabins and farmhouses, stoves that burn old-time fuels have been redesigned in recent years to be more efficient - and sleek enough to fit in upscale homes.
Despite their growing popularity, such stoves make up only a tiny fraction of the home heating market.
In Maryland, for example, nearly half the 2.2 million households use natural gas, according to a 2003 census survey. Electricity heats 681,330 homes, the survey found, followed by oil in 296,061 homes. By contrast, wood was used by 27,307 of those surveyed and coal by 6,240.
That's because alternative fuels aren't always as practical or cheap as they might seem, says Dennis Buffington, a professor and expert on corn stoves at Pennsylvania State University's agricultural college.
Coal is often considered dirty, he said, though today's tightly sealed stoves let virtually no dust escape. And corn can attract mice, birds and squirrels if it's not properly stored.
"It's not for everybody," says Buffington, who has created a model comparing the cost of burning corn with conventional fuels. "Corn can be cheaper and it's a renewable resource. But it depends on where you live."
For a farmer, a $3,000 corn stove can quickly pay for itself in saved heating expenses. But for a suburbanite, Buffington said, it might be less cost-effective and a hassle.
