I just replaced the firepot on my pellet stove last week. $300.
I’ve heated my home with wood pellets for the last five years. I have a Quadrafire Santa Fe stove.
In a typical year, we’ll use about two tons of pellets in the heating season. When I got the stove, that’d cost about $300, which is a helluva good deal.
Last year, I spent just over $500 – which is still really inexpensive compared to any other form of heat.
For most of that five-year period, I’ve used Manke Clean Burn Pellets, which are produced here locally in Tacoma. They burn really hot, and produce almost no ash. The ash from two tons easily fit into the ash drawer on my stove.
I was cleaning the stove one morning last week and punched a hole in the side of the firepot – it had rusted through in the area by where the starter element was welded on to the pot (area circled in red on photo).
Also, I noted the white deposits on the air holes (arrows). I wet the tip of my finger and touched the white area, then tasted it – it tastes salty.
When I went to the dealer to get the new firepot, I described the damage to the parts guy – who used to work as a repairman. He asked how old the firepot was – I told him four years (it was replaced under warranty when the stove was one year old).
Then the guy asked, “You use Clean Burn, huh?”
He said when he was working as a repairman, he’d found that if the people used Clean Burn pellets, the average life of the firepots went between 4-5 years. Almost every time. But if they burned any other type of pellets, the pots would generally last 7-8 years.
The difference is salt.
Manke gets a significant portion of their raw lumber in the form of log rafts – logs floating in a raft in salt water. And some of the trees look like they may have been in the water for a long, long time.
I know that because I’m a longshoreman and in years past, I used to work at the Weyerhaeuser Log Export yard right across the Hylebos waterway from Manke. As we’d be loading a ship with logs bound for Japan, the Manke guys would be pulling logs out of the water for their mill. And it was easy to tell some of those logs had been in the water for quite a long time.
One time, I got a bag of their pellets that must have been all from saltwater damaged wood. The day after burning part of the bag, there was a white powder all around the rim of the firepot – which tasted salty. I took the bag back to the place I got it and traded it for a different one.
I never had another bag that was as bad.
Later, maybe a couple years ago, I heard that Manke had supposedly corrected the salt problems and had stopped using wood soaked in saltwater. And in fact their guaranteed analysis states that chlorides are now less than 250 PPM. But I guess that’s not the case. Or not – maybe the main damage was done 2-3 years ago before they excluded wood from log rafts.
Whatever.
I plan to contact the company and ask for an explanation. Unless I hear something good, me and Manke are going to part company.