>I have a 40# bag for $4.00 labeled Wood Stove Fuel pellets. They are
>1-1/1 2 inches long and hard pressed. They disintegrate w/urine. Are
>these safe as the regular pellets?

Sue:

I am pretty sure those are safe. I found only one product, which is
what I was referring to before, and it is pretty easy to tell it from
"regular" stove pellets. For that matter, I think anything that is
actually labeled stove pellets is just fine.

Someone else asked me to describe this product in more detail.

It was in a mostly-clear plastic bag with a green top. I do not recall
the brand name or I would have told everybody already. I thought I
still had the bag in my closet but when I looked last night it was not
there; I must have thrown it away. It was a while ago that I found it,
around 6 months to a year.

Regular wood-stove pellets, at least those that I have seen, are hard,
dry, pretty smooth, and light-colored, "blonde" as they often say of
wood. They also tend to have a more-or-less uniform color, although
individual tiny bits might be a bit darker or lighter. They break
rather than crumble, and pretty much disintegrate into sawdust mush
when wet.

Also, the wood-stove pellets with which I am familiar tend to be
roughly the same size as the pelletized paper litter I use regularly,
maybe a little bigger but I never measured.

The ones I am talking about were somewhat darker in color, and had
darker brown, almost black specks. In fact, if you have seen the
"cracked wood" chips sold as litter, this is about the best way I can
describe them: they look like somebody took the cracked wood product
and loosely pressed it into pellets. Darker in color than wood-stove
pellets, and they are not hard, they easily crumble even when dry. But
the chunks they are made from are larger than sawdust, larger than the
stuff wood-stove pellets are made from. So they don't turn to mush when
wet. But "dry" is relative: they were also resinous and sticky with
sap, not dry like the wood-stove pellets. The "pellets" were also
larger diameter. About twice the diameter, I would say, of paper
litter pellets. And it also smelled very strongly of pine resin.

And that's about it. It didn't occur to me that it might be somehow
unusual, so I didn't think to make a point of remembering the name or
taking any pictures. But if you know what a wood-stove pellet looks
like, that ain't it. It's larger, a bit darker with very dark specks,
pressed from larger chunks, and more crumbly.

[Posted in FML 7409]