Lifestyles

Mike Buckiso, vice president of the Fireplace & Patioplace stores, says buyers of wood stoves and fireplace inserts want one thing.

"'Give me heat,' they are saying," he insists.

That obviously would be the case for Dave and Rebecca Babilya of Saxonburg, Butler County. They bought a soapstone wood stove for their home. Rebecca says they use it "24/7" and hope not to turn on their furnace this winter.

Wood-burning stoves and fireplace inserts provide an efficient, controllable level of heat for homes of all sorts, users and heating professionals say. That has made them a good choice for anyone hunting warmth, not just a lovely, crackling hearth scene.

They also qualify this year for an income tax credit of as much as $1,500 for 30 percent of the cost of purchase and installation.

Nancy Reader, owner of Hearth & Home Furnishings in Zelienople, Butler County, says stoves and inserts provide the kind of heat that separates the casual "two-hour burner" who builds a fire for a charming evening from an "eight-hour burner" who uses a fire to heat a home.

Best ways of getting heat

The hunt for heat takes several routes.

It centers on wood-burning stoves and inserts, which are "basically the same animal" but with different kinds of fur, Buckiso says.

Wood stoves generally are made of steel, cast iron and soapstone and take on fairly different roles through those materials, says Jim Walnoha, owner of Ed's Woodshed in Bridgeville.

"Steel heats up the fastest, cast iron is more efficient but takes longer to heat up, and soapstone will hold the heat forever," he says.

Sometimes, Buckiso says, there is not the need for the hottest wood stoves and inserts in this area.

"Pittsburgh winters generally are a few weeks of miserable cold, but mostly days of 25 to 35 (degrees)," he says.

The range for stoves can go from $600 for steel to $4,000 for soapstone, but clients usually are looking for them to perform a certain role, so they accept the costs, the retailers say.

Rebecca Babilya, for instance, says her $3,000 soapstone stove is well worth the money for the job it does.

"Even at night, if the wood goes out, the stove will stay warm for six hours or so just from the heat it has stored," she says. "So the room doesn't get cold."

But stoves require space in a room, which makes fireplace inserts popular when that is not available. Inserts work the same as stoves, but generally have blowers that pump the heat out of the fireplace area.

The big advantage, Buckiso and Reader say, is that inserts can be placed in fireplaces that might be cracked and unsafe for other types of burning. That can make inserts popular in areas such as this with an aging housing stock.

Buckiso says the "give me heat" clientele is buying inserts about as much as stoves, and he thinks that is growing fairly constantly.

Reader says inserts, which require venting or chimney lining, start around $2,500.

Venting is not a minor issue, says Megan Murphy of Hearth & Home. She says she warns clients that the whole venting process could equal or exceed the cost of a stove.

No chimney required

Another option is a zero-clearance stove added to a room that doesn't necessarily have a chimney.

Reader calls them "glorified wood stoves" in their efficiency and operation.

In these cases, Buckiso says, a space is built into and around the exterior wall of a home. The stove is self-contained and does not require brick or stone around it. It burns efficiently, holds heat like a soapstone and dispenses with a fan like an insert, Buckiso says.

Tim Underwood went that route when he built a new home in Grove City, Mercer County. He has a lot of trees on his property and was looking for an efficient and practical way to heat his house with the wood.

This is the first full winter for the stove that he installed in March, but he feels confident it is going to heat his 2,300-square-foot home.

"Once you get it going, it just goes by itself," he says of the unit that cost about $5,000 with installation and venting.

While his house has a more open design that is good for wood heat, he, retailers and Babilya admit the boxed-off layout of traditional homes can prevent heat from traveling, causing cold spots.

Another option

The efficiency of stoves and inserts also is rivaled by pellet stoves. They use pellets generally made of recycled wood, which are loaded into an auger-driven system that systematically feeds the fuel into the fire.

But they have not caught on here much.

Buckiso says the availability of wood and natural gas in this area holds back their popularity.

Pellets cost about $250 a ton, and it is easy to use a ton a month if the stove is being asked to do heavy heating jobs, Walnoha says.

While it is easy to spend that or more for a cord of wood, and use several cords in a winter, many homeowners have wood supplies on their property or otherwise readily available.

"Everyone knows someone with a tree they would like to have chopped down," says Don Johnson, director of market research for the Virginia-based Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association.

Underwood says he enjoys cutting down trees and chopping wood, and that was one of the reasons he chose a stove for heat.

Johnson says some elements of pellet stove use can be seen as problems. The 40-pound bags pellets come in can be difficult for some elderly users to handle. The fans that expel the heat generally are run by electricity, reducing their effectiveness if there is a power failure.

The association measures product interest in shipments from manufacturers. Even though pellet sales shot up greatly in 2008, they still were only 40 percent of woodstove and insert shipments, which were down 5 percent.

Buckiso says interest in pellet stoves amounts to only 20 percent of his stove business.

Walnoha and Johnson agree the availability and price of natural gas greatly affect any wood-burner sale, and overall there was a 21 percent drop in shipments in 2008.

Johnson says when natural gas is available and reasonably priced, gas-burning fireplaces or even inserts become the dominant choice.

For a "two-hour burner," the switch-on nature of the gas fireplace is an easy choice.

"But wood is an attitude," Reader says. "People who grow up with it like it, like the smell of it, like working with it."

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