Winter is toasty with corn heater Switching to stove helps Akron couple cut bills and chills By Mary Beth Breckenridge Beacon Journal staff writer
-------------------------------------------------------------------- The market has no way of accounting for erosion of US stockpiles to this market which is estimated to be any where from 1-2 million bushells (25,000-50,000 tonnes) a day. Whilst stoves are not used all year round, some units are used for water heating all year round. At some point following the US harvest or maybe even during it, corn prices are likely to explode in anticipation of strong demand from ethanol producers and record livestock numbers in feedlots. The grain boom is coming! EF --------------------------------------------------------------------
The fuel for Pat and Vickie Gramley's primary heating source cost about $300 last winter.
That's not per month. That's for the entire season.
The Gramleys switched last winter to a corn-burning stove, which burns dried feed-corn kernels to produce heat. The corn stove is the main source of heat for their 2,000-square-foot house in Akron's Firestone Park, although they use a kerosene heater to take the chill off the second floor on the coldest days.
Pat Gramley, a construction contractor, became intrigued by corn heaters when he saw one in a catalog. What caught his attention was a cost comparison that showed corn to be far more economical than conventional heating sources.
Living in Ohio, ``I figured, well, the corn is here,' he said. Transportation costs would be minimal, he figured, and finding a supplier wouldn't be a problem. So after considerable research, he spent about $2,000 on a Vulcan stove capable of producing 60,000 British thermal units of heat.
The stove is essentially a metal box about 3 feet high, 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep. The top half of the unit is a covered hopper that holds 100 pounds of corn -- enough for 24 to 30 hours. It feeds the corn into the burner below at a rate determined by the thermostat setting. A heat exchanger warms the air inside the unit, and a blower sends the heated air into the room.
Feed corn won't pop because it has different properties than popping corn, said Dennis Buffington, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Penn State University. The corn in heating stoves also burns at a much higher temperature than that used to pop corn -- 1,200 to 1,400 degrees, he said.
The corn burns so efficiently that the unit doesn't need a chimney, Pat Gramley said. Instead, combustion gases are sent outdoors through a vent in the wall behind the unit.
The stove sits in the Gramleys' living room during the heating season and is stored in the garage the rest of the year. The heater gets warm enough that sitting next to it is uncomfortable, but the blower keeps the outside of the unit from getting too hot to touch, they said.
Multiple benefits
The Gramleys still have their furnace, just in case. They set the thermostat at about 62 degrees, so the furnace comes on only if the stove runs out of corn.
The saving has been substantial. The couple paid about $300 for around three tons of corn last year, enough to last through what was a fairly mild winter. The Gramleys expect that most years, their outlay will range from $300 to $500.
For other homeowners, the cost would depend on factors that include the cost of corn, the efficiency of the heater, the size of the house and the severity of the winter. For a typical, 2,000-square-foot Midwestern house using 85.3 million Btus of heat during a winter, the heating cost would be $884 for corn, compared with $1,231 for natural gas and $2,251 for electricity, according to a formula devised by C.H. Schilling, a mechanical engineer at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan.
(Those figures assume a corn price of $3.24 a bushel -- about what the Gramleys paid -- as well as the Energy Department's projected prices of roughly $12.60 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas and 9 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity in this region. The formula also factors in typical efficiencies for the various types of heating equipment.)
Cost isn't the only benefit of using corn as a heating fuel, however. Corn is a renewable energy source that burns cleanly, with no smoke or odor, Pat Gramley said. It's also relatively easy to handle and store, and installing the heating unit is fairly simple.
Nevertheless, he said heating with corn requires some work. For one thing, the user needs a way to get the corn home. The Gramleys buy theirs from a feed supplier in Deerfield, haul it home in their pickup truck and store it in bags on pallets in their garage.
The corn also must be cleaned before it's burned to remove pieces of cob and other debris. The Gramleys clean theirs by pouring it from one bucket to another in front of a fan that blows the debris away.
In addition, the hard chunks of corn ash called clinkers must be removed periodically, maybe even daily.
Growing interest
Nevertheless, the prospect of saving money at a time of rising fuel costs seems to be sparking interest in corn-burning stoves at Lehman's hardware store in Kidron, said Glenda Lehman Ervin, the company's vice president of marketing. The store recently started selling a Greenfire multiburner stove, a heater that burns not only shelled corn, but also hulled wheat and fuel pellets made of wastes such as sawdust, wood shavings, corn and the shells of walnuts and peanuts.
The pellets come in bags that are more convenient to buy and use than corn, Ervin said. They're more expensive -- a 40-pound bag costs $4.99 at Lehman's, while 40 pounds of corn costs the Gramleys about $2 -- although they burn slightly more efficiently because they have less moisture.
Ervin said similar stoves didn't sell well when the company offered them in the past, but newer units have improvements such as computer panels to regulate how fast the fuel feeds into the heater.
The store got a lot of inquiries last year when heating costs rose, Ervin said, and the new stove was generating interest even before it was hooked up and operating. ``We see a lot of people who want to knock some dollars off their fuel bill,' she said.
The Gramleys used to have a wood stove to cut their energy bills, but the corn burner requires far less labor and mess, Vickie Gramley said.
Besides, her husband added, it's ``pretty much idi/ot-proof.' Mary Beth Breckenridge is the Beacon Journal home writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3756, or at [email protected] via e-mail.
