Prior to social media, Scott was an active contributor at Hearth.com where he authored just over 2200 DIY articles for pellet stove repair and is noted in the Hearth.com wiki pages under Stove Makers, Hearth History/ People as one of the people who were responsible for hearth industry innovations.
Scott lives in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and runs pellet-stove-service.com. His company services pellet stoves mostly in southeastern Massachusetts. Scott entered the profession after his mother-in-law bought a used pellet stove but couldn’t find anyone who was willing to service it. As he puts it, “I was available, had tools and was dating their daughter at the time. I had never even heard of a pellet stove and somehow, I quickly fixed it. The family owned a breakfast diner and told customers I could fix their pellet stove. That’s how I got started. Three years later I was so busy I had to quit my day job”. By 2019, nearly 20 years later, Pellet-Stove-Service.com had performed over 20,000 service calls all over New England.
Scott says that he has a spreadsheet with all of the makes and models he is familiar with and that list includes 57 Manufacturers encompassing 253 models spanning the mid-to-late 1980s to present day.
In 2019, Scott retired from service, closed his service company down, to work for the largest pellet stove parts supply company in the US, which is located in Bourne, MA. After this 6-year hiatus, Scott is restarting his service company and reconnecting with customers and colleagues alike.
Most reliable pellet stoves – Harman, Travis and Pel Pro
What do you think are the most reliable pellet stoves?
“I think Travis and Harman stoves are the two top tier manufacturers in America. Across all their products they don't put their name on something that's sub-par. They are built very well, and they are wonderful to look at.
They have always been on top though, right? Anything new with them?
Harman still has the most models to choose from, and I think also opened the doors to their dealers to sell online. Not just parts but stoves as well. Now you can sell their stoves directly online without even having a showroom, provided the company or person that sold them is going out there to do the service.
At one time Travis discontinued everything in favor of one model, the AGP. It was offered in a freestanding model and as an insert. The burn pot design was very reminiscent of Harman’s horizontal feed option…but the stove chopped up the pellets to get them to a uniform size prior to combustion. They now offer more models with that pellet burning engine. Travis still seems to be the only big company out there that still maintains its dealerships aligned with its own sense of pride. Travis used to tout themselves as the world's largest family-owned hearth maker and I think that they take that literally, and their dealers are part of that “family,” and they go to extraordinary lengths to protect those dealerships. They won't let them sell online but they also won’t allow parts dealers, not part of that family, to sell their parts or even use logos. I can remember their lawyers getting in touch with us at the parts store to say we couldn’t use their trademark (Lopi or Avalon logo) on the website without their expressed written permission.
Harman is now just a brand of a larger company, Hearth & Home Technologies (HHT), just like Quadrafire. Harman doesn’t even have its own website; I think that's been rolled into Forge & Flame. It looks like HHT got rid of the Eco/Choice line up (maybe Quadrafire absorbed some of that with the Quad CAB50). PelPro has been designated the low-end box store brand. But Quadrafire seems to have absorbed the controllers of PelPro too. Quadrafire used to have a high-quality product, in my opinion. Then they started finding ways to make it more “advanced.” Their stoves are not cheaply made, but it's not the quality of a Harman build or a Lopi, and it's about the same price. Quadrafire seems to be held together with about 200 Phillips head screws. It looks beautiful but that’s just the surface. Some models still use the legacy control box. The more advanced units oddly enough use the cheaper PelPro controls. I’m going to need a couple years servicing them to get back on top of what changed while I was gone.
I’m a huge fan of PelPro. It used to be made the company Danson’s until 2014 and wasn’t a great stove. But since HHT acquired that product line, I really like them. I love the simplicity of the PelPro stoves. For $1,300 you can get a stove that works. And the PelPro troubleshooting manual must be the most user friendly and most complete service manual I've ever seen. It's so well done.
If HHT made such a great owner’s manual for PelPro are they doing that for their other brands too?
It doesn’t seem that so. PelPro isn’t sold through a dealer network, and I suppose the higher-ups directed the marketing teams to step it up a little. I mean nobody wants customers calling the help line all winter. That’s a huge problem. But their other brands that are sold through a dealer network, and they need to protect the dealers too, right? They don't want to undercut their dealers. To the extent that dealers actually provide service, you don’t want stove owners learning how to fix everything themselves!
You say you are a big fan PelPro, which is an inexpensive stove. Surely it must have weaknesses.
The PelPro line has two flaws, one is an easy fix, the other probably needs better engineering or materials. First, the bracket that holds the hopper lid switch is so thin. It’s really flimsy and is held in with two little sheet metal screws, and you have this heavy lid that's coming down and striking the lid switch and after a while, the brackets starts to get weak and literally bends itself down and at some point the switch stops working. Luckily, it's easy to just bypass that switch altogether. The second issue has to do with the feed system. The pin that secures the feed motor to the auger shaft isn’t strong enough and it gets soft from the constant torque, and it breaks. But when it breaks it’s not noticeable. It still looks like it’s okay and people get a start-up error. If you follow the flow chart, you’d think it’s a heat sensor issue. Eventually, if you look hard enough, you’ll discover that the pin through the auger shaft is missing and the piece that broke is still wedged inside the shaft. By this point you may have to replace the whole feed system because you won’t be able to separate the motor from the plate or the auger itself. I’ve never had a problem with it because I understand the system and I can file down the metal that’s changed shape and rebuild it, but your average stove owner or inexperienced tech isn’t going to get that far. Every PelPro will eventually fall to the same fate. The metal used in this system really should be harder and machine to better tolerances, but it’s not a high-end build.
Least reliable pellet stoves – US Stove brands (Breckwell, Ashley, Vogelzang, King) and Master Forge
Generally, I would steer away from all those brands, especially the ones newer ones with Wi-Fi connectivity.
When you're setting it up, the owner's manual wants you to sync your phone but to do this, you need the MAC address of your router, and you need some computer networking skills. A lot of people that buy these stoves simply can’t do this. The problem is, to initialize the stove setup and get the control board to function you kind of need your phone synced. The Manuals don’t really explain the controls because they assume your phone is synced and the stove’s control functions are on your phone.
To use the control board without your phone, you have to go through a series of prompts. It's really complicated and the controls aren’t very intuitive. There are blinking lights and sounds but they don’t really correlate to what’s going on. The user (including me) feels like something is wrong or the stove is waiting for the user to do something which isn’t explained in the manual. I spent an hour trying to figure this out for somebody, and in the end, I got the stove to work but we couldn’t really tell what level the stove was burning at or even how to turn it off.
Three hours into the service I still couldn’t get the stove on the network, so we just left it as it was.
There was also a remote control that you can use for the stove to turn it on and off and such but the model I was setting up required the remote to be tethered with a cord. It's like a 1960s remote that has a nine-foot cord, so it looks like a remote control, but it's just a tethered handheld. When I get a service call for one of these stoves, it’s almost always because they couldn't figure out how to turn their new stove on.
Also, the back of the stove has a temperature sensor to sense the room temperature, but a lot of times if the exhaust pipe is vertical, the pipe is right next to the sensor, and it thinks the room's hotter than it is. So, the stove will shut down when it should be heating up. Another thing I found on some of these stoves is that inside the hopper there is a pellet optical sensor. This sensor is to let you know via your phone that it’s time to add more fuel. But if a pellet blocks it the stove shuts off because it thinks you have no pellets in there. It’s just a stupid design. I mean, the stove goes into a shutdown mode because it’s low on pellets, but the stove would shut down anyway once it ran out of pellets, right? Everything I just explained was just one stove. Brand new. Purchased this year at an ACE hardware store. I feel for the people who buy these stoves. It’s tragic.
What other brands would you stay away from?
Master Forge is sold by several big box stores. People loathe them. They are very much like ComfortBilt and maybe are even the exact stoves as ComfortBilt. But there seems to be absolutely nobody standing behind the Master Forge brand for technical help or parts. All these stoves seem to come from the same regions or areas of China. With ComfortBilt, there’s an actual American distributor behind it, which has an active role in development. They are more of a marketing company, but they do support their stoves. They have a powerful internet and social media presence.
If you're shopping in the $1,000 range for a pellet stove, I’d go with the PelPro. I wasn't a fan of ComfortBilt stoves prior to stepping away from service, but I’ve seen many ComfortBilts lately and they are growing on me.
Scott
Williamson is also on the Advisory Board of the Alliance for Green Heat and was
an advisor to the
Pellet Stove Design Challenge, held at Brookhaven National
Lab in 2016.
Related Content Quoting Scott Williamson
Six tips to buy the right pellet stove (AGH blog, 2017)
Pellet stoves: The Newest In Stylish, Warm Room Heating (Biomass Magazine, 2014)
Overview of types of Pellet Stoves (AGH, 2025)
An
Independent Performance Review of Six Pellet Stoves
(AGH, 2015)
