Wittus and Seraph win Pellet Stove Design Challenge

Rene Bindig and Niels Wittus,
designers of the Pellwood stove.

A German designed Wittus stove that is distributed by a New York company, and a stove made by Seraph Industries, the smallest U.S. pellet stove manufacture, won first and second place in the 2016 Pellet Stove Design Challenge. 

This was the third Stove Design Challenge promoting innovation in wood and pellet heating to help consumers reduce fossil heating fuels with appliances that burn far cleaner and more efficiently than average stoves.

The Wittus Pellwood stove is an extremely innovative prototype that can burn both pellets and cordwood, bringing advanced technology from basement furnaces up into the living room to achieve very low emissions of less than half a gram per hour.  The second place stove, Seraph’s Phoenix F25i, is nearly ready for certification testing.  It also achieved a very clean burn, consistently under 1 g/hr. and has innovative features to help and encourage the consumer to keep the stove operating well.

The Seraph team with AGH President
John Ackerly (right).

Other stoves featured extremely innovative designs, including the futuristic looking, radiant heat Torrefire stove with a glass burn pot. In addition, the gravity fed Vibrastove, with a burn plate instead of pot, used only one small fan and made its own electricity for off-grid use.

The Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Lab hosted the event. The Lab conducted extensive testing of the competition stoves and will provide valuable data for the EPA, industry and other stakeholders about the strengths and weaknesses of testing protocols.  Each stove was tested three times, to see if the stove operated consistently or whether the testing protocol may lead to variable results.

 

The Torrefire pellet stove.

“Designing a very affordable, high performing pellet stove should not be rocket science,” said Dr. Tom Butcher, Head of the Energy Resources Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “But in some ways its harder than rocket science because solid fuel combustion is extremely complicated to design for and test,” he said.  “What makes this competition great is the new ideas from the competing teams and the spirit of collaboration.”

Pellet stoves are widely seen as a modern, cleaner, and a user-friendlier alternative to cord wood stoves.  More states and programs are starting to give larger rebates and incentives for pellet stoves than cord wood stoves, and are beginning to focus on the stricter emission standards that will take effect in 2020.  This Design Challenge showed that the 2020 standards for particulate matter would not be difficult for pellet stoves to attain, but that many pellet stoves have mediocre efficiencies.

Steve Spevak, designer of the
Vibrastove and Dr. Tom Butcher
(right) during testing.

The Pellet Stove Design Challenge is a partnership between various organizations and agencies that are interested in exploring the potential of technology to meet a growing demand for renewable energy.  The principal funder,  the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), runs Renewable Heat New York, a multi-layered incentive program for pellet heating equipment at the residential, commercial and industrial scale.  Other partners include the United States Forest Service, Brookhaven National Lab and state agencies from Massachusetts and Washington, along with leading experts from Clarkson University, the Masonry Heater Association and the Osprey Foundation.

The Design Challenge brought nearly a hundred students, stove builders, backyard inventors,  academics, regulators and experts together to discuss and debate the state of the pellet stove technology, indoor and outdoor air quality issues and deployment strategies.  Of particular note were three university teams that are designing stoves from engineering departments at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Maryland.  The speakers included Adam Baumgart-Getz from the EPA, Marius Wohler from the European BeReal initiative, nanoparticle expert Dr. Barbara Panessa-Warren and scores of others.  Presentation abstracts are available along with most of the powerpoint presentations.

Marius Wohler, one of the European
presenters, describing the BeReal survey
and testing, leading to new testing
protocols in Europe.

 The event coordinator, the Alliance for Green Heat, is exploring a return to advanced cord wood stove technology and using the National Mall in Washington DC again as a venue in 2017.  Stakeholders are invited to contact info@forgreenheat.org with input about the next Design Challenge.

- - -

The Alliance for Green Heat promotes modern wood and pellet heating systems as a low-carbon, sustainable and affordable energy solution. The Alliance works to advance stove innovation through technology competitions and advises state and federal agencies on improving programs that involve wood and pellet heating. Founded in 2009, the Alliance is an independent non-profit organization based in Takoma Park Maryland.

Gravity Fed Pellet Stove Wins Vesta Award

Gap 2020

Updated: May 2022. After years of development, a company finally produced an EPA certified pellet stove in 2013 that needs no electricity.  The stove was developed by an Oregon company, Wiseway from which the stove takes its name, and then the company was bought by US Stove, who improved its design. The unit uses natural draft for the air and gravity to feed the pellets into the combustion chamber.

The designer of the Wiseway, Gary Wisener, has now built another EPA certified gravity fed stove with a partner, Gene Bradley, who owns Smokey's Stoves in Oregon.  The Gap 2020 is designed for off-grid and has many valuable features such as a cooktop and an attachable one and hot water reservoir.

US Stove owns another brand, Breckwell, which now also makes a gravity fed stove called the Traverse. The Traverse is 2020 certified, but it reportedly had quality problems with welding, which hopefully are fixed by now.

Many gravity fed pellet stoves are on the market in Europe, including ones by Tulikivi (Finland), Yola (Ireland), Koppe (Germany) and Altech (Netherlands). Click here for more on gravity fed pellet stoves.

The Wiseway

For decades, one of the main drawbacks of pellet stoves has been that they don’t work in a blackout because they require electricity. And, with so many moving parts, pellet stoves often break down and need much more maintenance than wood stoves. 

When the stove started to sell in 2013, quite a few customers had problems with it, including the pellets in the hopper catching on fire, also known as a “burn back.”  The stove has been redesigned.

(If you are looking to buy a pellet stove, check our "6 tips to buy the right pellet stove" based on independent research.)

The launch of the Wiseway illustrates a much wider problem in the stove industry: a lack of reliable, independent product reports that assess consumer satisfaction and reliability.  Even if consumers spend lots of time on the Internet reading various consumer reviews on sites like Hearth.com, it is still very difficult to get a sense of how common the problems are and what overall rating a product should have.  Hearth.com has several threads on the Wiseway that are worth reading if you are considering purchasing one.  

Consumer Reports once did a very limited review of 6 pellet stoves, in which they recommended two.  The review did not even mention emission rates, nor did it test for fan or augur noise, other common issues that consumers have with stoves.  The Wiseway has no fan or augur noise, which is a big plus for some consumers.  Moreover, the stove has a very respectable emission rate of 1.9 grams per hour.  Equally important, it was EPA certified in 2014 during a time where pellet stoves were not required to get certified.  EPA certified pellet stoves are likely to be more efficient since many, if not most, uncertified stoves pour excess air through the stove, which can significantly reduce efficiency. 

The Wiseway has an EPA verified efficiency of 69%, higher than some more expensive pellet stoves that use electricity.   Many pellet stoves have efficiencies under 70%. The Alliance for Green Heat advises consumers to rely on the efficiencies on the EPA list and find one is that is 75% efficient or higher to get the federal tax credit which is 26% in 2022 and 22% in 2023 which includes all installation costs as well.

There is clearly a large market niche to be filled by a gravity fed pellet stove and Wiseway is the first one out of the gate.  We suspect there will be competitors in coming years and that competition is likely to lead to better and better products.