I was wondering if anyone had any experience with either one of these furnaces. I've been using a AES Magnum 7500 the last 6 years and just wanted to keep ahead of what's going on in the industry so that when it's time to replace the 7500 I'll have a good idea of what I want. I'm looking for reliability issues and amount of pellets/corn consumption rates.

I have been burning a maxim 250 going on 2 years. The only problem I have ever had was last Saturday. I had the auger gear go bad. It is totally covered under warranty. I am completely happy with this stove. It does exactly what it says its going to do and is easy to use. I basically light it in October and let it go out in April. You just have to feed it corn or pellets and clean ashes out about every 3 days. I am just switching to pellets because of the cost of corn. Its my understanding that most pellets even less ash than corn. I heat in the neighborhood of 4500 Square feet and am pleased with the corn usage. I don't know how the pellets will play out. I hope this helps. If I had to buy again I would buy this stove in a heartbeat.

Pippsfarm,
Thank you for your comments. Since you had a gear go out, how much down time do you figure you had before things were up and running again? The answer you give will tell me a lot about the company and how well it responds to emergency part requests.
When your unit was down, how did you heat your house?

When I installed my Magnum years ago,it was meant to be an add-on unit. But I had read so many posts on the old forum from folks who used it as an add-on and couldn't get the draft right etc. piping the heat from the Magnum 7500 into the main furnace duct work was presenting a number of problems.
At the time, my regular furnace was on its last leg so the decision was to remove it and put in the Magnum as the main and only heat source. I did and haven't had a bit of draft problems and it burns nice. The only worry that keeps me awake on a cold January night when the temps are hovering around zero, is should something go bad, it's not going to be a phone call to the local furnace repairman and back-up and running in a few hours! It's going to be days waiting for part shipments and trouble shooting!To be honest, I have to give AES a "D" for customer service. They are not good at all!
So I think you can understand my question on reliability,customer service, how complicated the unit is to trouble shoot, etc.
I really think folks are going in the right direction with the pellet/corn burning furnaces. A lot of money can be saved over the cost of fuel oil and LP. As long as they're easy to trouble shoot and get parts quickly for, they'll work just fine!

I would really recommend keeping a backup source of heat to any solid fuel burning appliance.

I'm on my 3rd year with the Maxim. 1st year broke an aerator and covered under warranty. No real down time to speak of. This year I had a mouse chew through the ignition cable and had to manually start it up this Fall. Had a couple hrs down time to install the new cable.

If you don't have a backup heat source I think I would stock the auger motors/gearboxes and fan as those may be the 1st to go. The bottom motor/gearbox looks really heavy duty though. Never had either apart.

Everything is subject to wear and tear.

Tim

Good advice, hartigan. Everyone should have some kind of back up plan to a burner. It's amazing how quickly a house will cool when it's -10 with wind...

We have two very old gravity feed NG furnaces in the basement (the old octopuses get checked out each year to make sure they're in good working order). No electric necessary to run them, which makes them great back-up systems for the corn stove. Power goes out, we still have heat. There have been a few times when I've had to turn one on to deal with the Bixby when it jammed and shut down during below zero weather (funny how those things never happen when it's relatively warm). So as long as the heat exchangers hang in there, we won't replace them.

Rick
When I got up Saturday Morn I didn't really notice anything amiss. About 11:00 AM I went outside to check on things and the control panel on the boiler was flashing 130 which is the water temp in the unit. It should have read about 178 degrees. Since it was Saturday my dealer wasn't open so I called Central Boiler at the 800 number. They were not open either. I have a propane furnace as backup heat for the house. I didn't have backup for my pole barn. It is insulated well and the heat is radiant heat through the concrete. I plugged in 2 electric heaters to keep the pole barn warm. There is a full bath and kitchen so I had to keep it warm. The electric heaters keep it 70 even though it was single digits outside. I called my dealer first thing Monday and explained to him what happened. He said it would be covered under warranty and ordered the parts. I picked them up this afternoon. He said they would even come out and install if I needed them to do that. I told him I would handle that but thanks anyway. I wanted to get back up and running asap.

Pipps,
It sounds like you have a good dealer who can respond to your needs in a timely manner.
After using my Magnum for 6 years or so, one tends to be out of the market and doesn't keep up with what all is out there. I often wondered about those outside boilers and if they were efficient to run. I have a friend that has a woodmaster, heats around 7000 sq.ft. and goes through 15-20 cord of wood per season! Now that sure seems like a lot of wood to me. I was just wondering if the outside pellet furnaces like the Maxim devoured mass amounts of pellets. At the moment I can get by with 5 ton per winter. On a night when it drops down into the teens I might go through 2 bags in 18 hours.

I hate the thought of putting in another furnace to use only as back-up. I see the Maxim runs about 7K plus installation, and another small lp furnace probably about 3K plus installation. I could see an easy 10K spent.

Since your unit sits outside,have you had any trouble with the electronics? I see there is a touch pad that appears to be loaded with function choices.

I've found a couple of dealers in my area so I'm going to see if I can see a unit in operation somewhere. At the moment, I'm just kind of looking down the road a piece for when I do have to do something. Thanks for your answers.
Rick

One key is good underground pipe. Not cheap but not the place to skimp.

I've seen used maxims for 3-5k.

I'm heating about 3500 sq ft with lots of glass and 27 foot cathedral ceilings (i.e. it's not easy to heat). I will go through about 8 tons of pellets a year, or about 450 bu of corn. I also heat my hot water. I put my Maxim as close as I dared to my house, about 6' away, to keep the outside pipe run short. As suggested above use Central Boiler ThermoPex for the outside run, not the cheap stuff.

To give you better numbers that you can correlate to your own heating needs, I was spending pretty close to $4000 / year on propane before I got the Maxim. Now I'm spending about $1300 / year on pellets plus $600 / year for propane, so it's cut my heat bill in half. I did all the install labor myself, so it's paid for itself after next year.

Regarding reliability, this is my third year and I've had two of the burn-pot stirrers melt over that time. The first one was replaced by my dealer at no charge. The second time Central Boiler sent me a new stainless steel version at no charge, and I got it in 3 days. From now on I have to buy a new one if it goes again. Since it runs fine without it, I wasn't ever down other than a few hours to cool when my new stirrer arrived. Still, I wouldn't consider removing my propane furnace. There are a lot of moving parts, it's not as reliable as a gas furnace, you are going to have the odd down period, and you don't want to have frozen pipes.

I put in my M-175 back in '08, I have had no big issues, cracked stirrators being the only part I have had to replace, I am on my third and will be calling my dealer for a stainless one soon. some adjustments you can make with the keypad are not listed anywhere in the instructions, I found out how to slow the rate of the upper auger and it keeps the drop to the lower auger open now, you should do this when burning pellets as if the drop is full you don't have any burn back protection in a power failure, on the newer maxims there is a screw out port that allows you to check the drop, but CB never mentioned that it needed to be open.
I read of one guy who had a burn back into the hopper and after replacing the parts that got melted he finished the season with it before shipping it back to CB for an overhaul.
Right now I am planning on ordering the hopper lid extension kit as it would give me another bag or two of pellets, this would make up for the bag or two of pellets left in the hopper with pellets as the sides of the hopper on the m-175 are not steep enough to feed the whole hopper into the auger. With corn this doesn't seem to be an issue.