corn stoves

Anonymous Poster · Oct 31, 2001

Does anyone out there have a corn burning stove? I have been considering buying one, because they put out quit a bit of heat with using just inexpensive shell corn. They also vent directly out your house like a dryer vent, so there is no need for a chimmeny. I am wondering if anyone has experience or comments that they would like to share on these stoves. Thankyou.
Van

cowboydoc · Oct 31, 2001

There are alot of them around here and they work very well. My buddy just built a new house, about 2700 square feet and that's all he uses for heat.

MossRoad · Nov 1, 2001

I heard that they were very efficient and burned clean. The one that I looked at, you had to remove one klinker(ash ball) about the size of a golf ball, every day. The only negative thing I saw was that it had AC powered auger to feed the corn and AC powered blower to increase heat flow(although the blower wasn't needed). So if you had a power outage, you couldn't feed the corn to the fire. That would be easily remedied with battery backup similar to a computer UPS. Do you have any links to corn burners on the net? I would be very interested.

<font color=green> MossRoad </font color=green>

Anonymous Poster · Nov 1, 2001

Buddy of mine sells them, and has one in his Heartland store.
Drawbacks, Price of the stove $1700- up, and the need for AC power.
The stove is also a bit noisy.
Positives- The price of corn makes it a real cheap source of heat, if you don't factor in the cost of the stove.
My personal feeling is that when you figure in the cost of the stove, it ain't such a good deal.

Joe_W · Nov 1, 2001

I did some research on corn stoves earlier this year, and found several posts that mentioned the auger motor would only last about 2 seasons before burning up the motor. As the auger turned it would grind a little off each kernal of corn, and then that residue would get gummy and bog down the auger motor, so that over time the motor would overheat and self destruct. But as the saying goes, "your results may differ".
One thing that may influence the corns ability to be ground up, may be the moisture content, ie. the dryer the corn, the less tendancy for it to muck up the auger, as the outer shell would in theory be harder. But that's just my opinion and not based on fact.
Joe W.

MossRoad · Nov 2, 2001

Did a searcha nd found several links, for those that are interested.
http://www.cornburner.com/ furnaces and boilers
http://www.northern-online.com/ They seem to sell everything, don't they?
http://www.cornstove.ca/
http://www.pinnaclepellet.com/appliances.html

<font color=green> MossRoad </font color=green>