Salvaging Wood Pellets

While shopping in Harbor Freight Tools I started chatting with a guy wearing a sweatshirt with the logo of a local pellet stove service company.

We got chatting about sifting 1/2 priced (seconds) pellets and how well it was working for him.

After a little Googling on pellet sifters this is the vacuum sifter I created to get through the rest of my Energex pellets.

It's not perfect but it does the job pretty reliable. It'll plug up if you poor too fast and it's annoyingly slow when you are in a hurry. But it works quite well. It thoroughly removes the fines from the pellets. It would feed a little faster if I could lose the 4 inch horizontal section from the middle of the feed pipe.

I've been using it for about a week now and the changes I've observed are:

• No clinkers in the burnpot
• I have not needed to vacuum ash in the past 6 days and it's still not close to needing it. (it needed to be done every 3-4 days before)
• The pellets ignite much faster and with less smoke 
• No failures to ignite
• No failures to feed (where the hopper has pellets, but they are wedge with dust buildup)
• The door glass is staying clear

After running 7-8 bags (~300 lbs) of pellets through the sifter it has extract more than a gallon worth of fines (pellet dust). 

4 inch layer of fines collected in the bottom of my shopvac.

It doesn't seem like much, until you see how much difference it makes in the stove performance.

I still dislike the brand, but spending < $30 beats throwing out $300+ of the remaining pellets.