Dear Jim: With gas, electricity and oil costs skyrocketing, I want to use a lower-cost renewable heat source for my home. Does installing a small wood-pellet heater make sense? I saw bags of pellets at a home center. – Al J.

Dear Al: A wood-pellet heater would be a convenient-to-use, Earth-friendly heating source even if conventional utility rates were not skyrocketing. I have used a wood-pellet heater to heat much of my own home for 10 years. With a battery-backup option, it is a good source of heat if your power goes off.

The 40-pound bags of pellets that you saw at your home center store typically cost only about $3 each. At a low-heat output setting, enough to take a chill off a room or two, a bag can last 30 to 40 hours. The pellet heater can also be set to high output to keep several rooms toasty warm.

A hopper is built into the back of the pellet heater. Some hold as much as two bags of wood pellets. Every day or two, lift the door and check the hopper. When it gets low, tear open another bag and pour in more pellets.

The wood pellets look a lot like rabbit food and they are 100 percent natural and renewable. They are made from waste sawdust from sawmills that would otherwise end up in landfills. The sawdust is heated and compressed, causing the natural resins in the wood to stick together, forming hard pellets.

Pellet heaters are available as either freestanding styles or fireplace-insert styles. The freestanding ones, like I use, are simple to install because no chimney is needed. An exhaust fan inside the heater blows the flue gases outdoors through a short double-wall vent pipe in the wall.

The efficiency and clean-burning characteristics of a pellet heater result from the small pellets and a lot of combustion air. With the tremendous amount of surface area on the tiny pellets and the exhaust fan pulling air through, they burn completely, creating no smoke and leaving very little ash.

You can control the heat output (room temperature) with a wall thermostat or a dial on the heater. For more heat, a tiny auger inside the heater feeds pellets faster into the firepot. There is also an adjustable fan built into the heater that circulates the room air through heat exchangers.

Many of the newer pellet heaters are very attractive, with real gold and brass trim and large glass fronts to view the flames. The main body of most is made of heavy-gauge welded steel with a decorative cast iron-glass door.

The only time that you will open the front glass door is to start it and clean out just a cup or two of ash every four days or so. For the most convenience, some models have built-in glow plug flame starters too.

Write for (instantly download – www.dulley.com) Update Bulletin No. 461 – buyer’s guide of 14 wood-pellet heater manufacturers listing styles, heat output, hopper capacity, auger type, vent location, prices, features and a fuel-cost comparison chart. Include $3 and a business-size SASE. Send to James Dulley, Bangor Daily News, 6906 Royalgreen Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45244.