Be sure to get these properly installed and checked they are working properly once in use. My parents spent $35K to clean the microsoot from their entire house caused by their leaky pellet burner. It wasn't evident the thing was leaking until my father's COPD was exacerbated to the point of near-death. Anything that couldn't be laundered or washed with a special solution (down to every single clothes hanger) had to be replaced. My cousin also had a leaky pellet burner.

do not buy a pellet stove if it is something you want to be able to rely on during a power outage.

if the power goes out, you cannot use your pellet stove.

buy a wood stove instead.

pellet stoves are unpopular for a good reason.

I have 2 pellet stoves. No one has died. I have no soot problem. I had them installed by professionals, of course. We have them serviced annually when we have our chimney's swept. Both of our stoves are inserts into existing fireplaces.

The pellet stoves allow us to set our central heating thermostat quite low, while the stoves, which are on their own thermostat, heat the living area to a nice toasty warmth. Every morning I come downstairs to a toasty warm living/dining/kitchen area with the additional pleasure of seeing a nice little fire burning.

The pellets are much much cleaner to live with than wood - which I find to be filthy. There is no danger of bringing termites and other pests into your house through wood stacked in the garage or nearby. There are a lot of different kinds of pellets - soft woods, hard woods. We experimented till we found one that burned well for us and that's what we use now. The pellets are made from sawdust and other wood waste - so they are more environmentally friendly than wood.

Some stoves will burn not just pellets but corn cobs, and other things - even wood. We have one of those, though we've never tried to burn anything but pellets. We clean the ashes out every couple of days and about once a month we do a bigger clean. We empty the 40 pound sacks of pellets into the hopper of the stove, and once it's full, we dump the extra into an old copper washtub next to the fire. We use a big animal feed scoop I got from an agricultural co-op to refill the hopper.

We have a small portable gasoline generator (because we live in a coastal area where there are occasional power cuts and flooding) and we can plug the stove into that. You only need the electricity to start the motor and run the fan. Ours provided adequate heat without the fan, during a 3 day power cut in March last year. Because one of our stoves will burn anything, we could have started a fire without the electric motor, but we haven't had to.

The biggest problem is that 99% of them are completely hideous and I wouldn't have them in my house. We searched a long time for our 2, which are enamelled and rather decorative like Vermont Castings or Waterford wood stoves. One of our is an Enviro Empress, and I have forgotten what the other one is.

We are really happy with ours. I might have had gas inserts instead of pellet stoves, but there's no gas on our street, so we went with the pellet stoves. No regrets at all.

Dulcibella, thanks for belittling my parents health and home problems. I hope it made you feel even more superior than you clearly already think yourself. I'm no Chicken Little. If you do any research on pellet burners, you'll find leaking is a common problem.