Home-grown heat -- Caledonia man burns corn instead of money for warmth

By David Steinkraus

Tuesday, January 3, 2006 2:03 AM CST

by david steinkraus Journal Times For a very few people, the uncertainties of the world energy markets now hold fewer fears. They are the people who have installed a home heating device that doesn't depend on petroleum or natural gas.

John Pucely, who lives on Fence Line Road in Caledonia, has had a corn-burning stove for about a month. He doesn't have enough experience with the stove yet to draw firm conclusions, but he's already seen what the stove can do for his wallet.

Last year, from Nov. 27 to Dec. 28, he was paying $6.26 a day for natural gas to run his furnace and water heater. He still pays to heat water, but by burning about 50 pounds of corn every day or so for home heat, he's cut his energy cost to $4.35 a day, a savings of almost $2.

"And then the environmental thing is a big thing with me too," Pucely said. "Something you can renew in a year is really cool."

The December just ended also was colder. Last year the average temperature for the month was 27.3 degrees. Through Thursday, the average for December 2005 was 22 degrees, according to the National Weather Service office in Sullivan.

"When it's really cold, you've got to turn it up," Pucely said. That does consume more corn, but when his family heated only with gas, they kept the thermostat at 64 to save money. Now they heat their 2,400-square-foot home to 70 or so. They do benefit from an open floor plan, which allows heat from the stove to move throughout the living spaces;

bedroom doors stay closed to keep them a bit cooler for sleeping.

Pucely has had the stove only a month because this year they're hard to come by.

"I finally ran into one on the Internet that I could get in Kewaskum," he said.

What happened this year was Katrina, and then Rita, said Ken Doubek, owner of Alaskan Fireplace Co. in Sturtevant. Fear of soaring natural gas prices drove a demand for alternate heat sources, he said: "The week after Katrina hit there was a 650 percent increase in demand for pellet stoves."

That demand was more than the manufacturers could handle, and the result, Doubek said, was that they rationed their production, giving preference to areas where stoves have traditionally sold well, meaning the East and West coasts. In the Midwest, natural gas has historically been less expensive, and the stoves haven't sold as well. He stopped taking stove orders after a time, and he hopes that the new orders he's taken since will be filled by

September.

"We were planning on selling them this year," said Mark Flynn, who owns DP Wigley Co. in Racine with his wife, Chris. "We had orders for five stoves this winter that we couldn't fill because we couldn't get them."

The Flynns still handle corn for fuel, and said some people this year were giving gifts of corn heat. But here, too, the demand from people is starting to outstrip what businesses are set up to deliver.

"People are now asking whether we can deliver a thousand pounds at a time," Flynn said.

In Europe homes have corn bins, and trucks pull up to make regular deliveries of corn or wood pellets, Doubek said. "And the name on the side of that truck is Shell." Yes, it's the oil company, which, along with other oil companies, is pushing into the biofuel market in Europe. Unfortunately, he said, local farmers haven't adopted that idea. "They can easily get $3 for a 40-pound bag, but they're whining about getting only $1.80 for a 50-pound bushel."

Doubek is a fan of wood pellets. You don't have to worry about moisture content (corn with more than 15 percent moisture doesn't burn well), they don't attract rodents, and pellet stoves are self-igniting, he said.

Yet owning one of these stoves is not like owning a gas furnace, Doubek said. "You've got to be a handy person to own a pellet stove."

The fire pot must be emptied daily, the ash tray about once a week. There's dealing with the 40-pound bags of pellets or corn to keep the fuel bin full, and the stove requires an annual disassembly and cleaning of the heat exchanger, combustion fan, and other parts exposed to sooty smoke.

John Pucely still has a gas furnace in his home. Corn stove hoppers hold fuel for only a couple of days, so if you're going to be away from home you need something else to keep the pipes from

freezing.

He was pleased to find that his insurance company didn't consider this type of stove as an increase in the risk of fire, but he still doesn't know whether he'll have a problem with rodents coming after his corn stores. Despite the unknowns, when it's cold he doesn't fret over how much money he's losing; he smiles at much he's saving.

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