Wood stove pellet burner!

[HellsCanyon]

A friend of ours has let us use his wall tent wood stove in the past. It's a sweet setup, it's burning wood pellets with this setup. The greatest part about it is that you can set it too feed at a "trickle" through the night so you don't have to get up to stoke the fire in the night! Very efficient as it burns about a softball size pile of pellets at the back of your stove.

Figured with Colorado coming up shortly I'd make my own setup! Since I don't own a torch, I just used an angle grinder with cutoff wheel and obviously my welder (so excuse the ugly cuts, also had to fill some 1/2"+ gaps where the tube meets the square pipe.

The item on the right slides into the square tube and you can slide it forward or backward to control how fast the feed is. I also welded a nut on the bottom of the square tube to use a piece of all-thread to help support the weight.

Mike

 

[HellsCanyon]

Still gotta get the hopper setup to fit in on top. We've used regular chimney pieces to adapt a 3-4' tall 6" diameter (maybe larger) pipe to fill up with the pellets.

Usually burn about 1/2 bag of pellets a night. If hanging in camp a lot and it's cold we figure on 1.5 bags of pellets per day.

Mike

 

[mtbshark]

right on looks pretty good to me Mike!
Keep us updated on how it ends up working.

 

[bobhunts]

Looks to be built like a vault and last. Keep us posted! Bob.

 

[5MilesBack]

You know, I looked at those pellet burners for my wall tent because I hate hauling wood to camp, and in some places it's surprisingly hard to find. But the ones I looked at said they won't work at high altitude.......can't remember why now. But that was a deal breaker for me because I'm always camping up high. How's yours work at 11k?

 

[HellsCanyon]

The highest elevation we've used ours at was around 9500' and it worked good but we could tell that we're at the upper end of its effective altitude unfortunately!

 

[Hunt'nFish]

Very nice Mike. I'm interested to see it finished and how it hooks up to the stove.
Perhaps you can shoot a video of the first burn w/ it??
Hunt'nFish

 

[HellsCanyon]

Alright here's a few pics and what not of my homemade pellet burner. It worked out great and heated a 16x20' wall tent as already mentioned with ease and actually was dang near too hot for sleeping.

I would probably make the "feeder grate" at a bit steeper angle as I noticed that we had some backburn into the bottom of the hopper.




You can see we use a VERY big hopper, enough to put 2 bags of pellets in and will burn at full capacity for 10ish hours...


What it looks like once it's rolling:




We were about 9K feet in colorado and it worked good still but we could definitely tell there was less oxygen at that elevation. They say they don't work very well over 8k'... we also only use a specific pellet type, but I forget the name at this time. We bought some different brand while in colorado and they wouldn't work at all!



Mike