Wood or Pellet stove for the 'cottage'.

We use a wood stove insert in our "up north" place. We can heat the entire house with it and it keeps the propane furnace off. Wood sells up there for $70 per face cord (rick). I would love to have a pellet stove but the drawbacks for us are initial cost of buying the stove and the cost of the pellets. It would be nice to have that automatic feed function instead of dealing with wood. Downstate we use a natural gas furnace.

A fireplace doesn't produce the same amount of heat as a stove. I burn a wood stove in my basement just for extra heat. Keeps my entire basement around 85 degrees and helps keep the actual heat from kicking on even really cold days.

Thank you for the feedback Dytecture, Marilyn and Adam. Luckily the weather has been a bit kinder this week (so far).

We've had a pellet stove insert for 11.5 years now, and use it to heat the whole house other than when I'm in a back bedroom on the computer. Then I turn on the electric heater for a few minutes, but other than that, we do fine with our pellet stove. It produces a very nice warm heat that keeps the house cozy.

I don't currently have any of the above choices. However, my grandparents victorian farmhouse was heated by the wood burning stove we cooked with. Waking up throughout the night to stoke the fire was a given. A fireplace that uses wood would have the same problem. Another friend had a coal furnace which also required regular stoking even at night. Fireplaces just generally don't provide enough heat to warm an entire room, hence the design of wingback chairs which were intended to allow the person seated in them in front of a fireplace to have his own micro-climate zone by holding the heat inside the wings. A friend of mine in New England uses a pellet stove and I haven't heard too many drawbacks of owning one of those. But for simply heating the house I'd have to go with gas furnace or something that can run through the night without needing to be tended.

Now, that being said, I absolutely love the sight, sound, and smell of wood burning and would love to have a fireplace or wood burning stove to bring that into my home in the winter.

@ Hayley, 11.5 years is quite the devotion.. glad to know that the pellet stove insert has proven its success thus far.

@ Jessica, interesting tidbit on the wingback chairs. You're right on that last note.. not much else beats the scent/sound of burning wood on a cold day.

Yes, they work on the same sort of principle as a Japanese Kotatsu table. Instead of heating the entire room, just keep a limited area warm to save on fuel costs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu

While I am here in California, so no polar vortex we use central heat. We only have gas fireplaces (we have two in a 2100 sq foot house which is dumb) which is expensive to run and wood mucks up our air quality.

Rocket Mass Heater, RMH. I am so sold on mine after installing it in December. The exhaust heat is reclaimed, you use about 1/5 the wood, the burn is so clean and thorough you get very little ash. It doesn't suck the warm air out of your room in that it gives back so much more than it pulls during burn. You can also put a teakettle or pot on top the burnbarrel and cook if you want to or need to. You can make it look like a nice built in bench, window seat, etc; and the cost is a lot less than you'd expect to install! No pellets. Only minor drawback is having to use 'straight' wood chunks you can stuff in the firehole and having to break them into large kindling size; but. It burns very hot and clean. I took my ugly old corner fireplace OUT after that went in; my furnace is not used much anymore; and I weekly scrape about a quart of ashes out of it after heavy and extended burning. Once the bench is heated up (usually I will sit to feed the firehole every 20 min or so for a few hours) it will give for hours afterwards. I do cheat though on the fireup and use an old blow-hairdryer for a few moments carefully to get the fire drafting properly but you can do it by a few lungfuls of air, but you will smell it for 5-10 min after. Once it is at full heat you don't smell a thing!

NO, I do NOT work for the places that make or sell plans for them. I just found something that works! This is the plans I bought and built from, roll over to see the firehole and burnbarrel top on left. Only drawback is the burnbarrel top.

We have a wood furnace. It is in the garage, but pumps heat through our floor vents. Leaves all the mess of a fireplace in the garage, but keeps the house toasty hot!

Usually, air movement between the garage and living areas of a house is a fire code violation.

Yes, Fred S, you are right. When we bought the furnace it was not available for shipping to all of the United States, due to a variation in fire codes. We are grateful to have been able to get one, though if we couldn't we would probably still use a wood stove. My husband likes cutting the wood and we like the nice, dry heat. I like to plant trees, so I try to counteract the lumberjack effect with my tree-hugging tendencies. We are able to heat the house with propane too, though it is incredibly expensive to use exclusively.

We currently have natural gas heat but no fireplaces or stoves. However, we will be building a house where we can't get natural gas. It gets to 100 degrees in the summer and we have spells of 20-degree weather in the winter (just outside the city limits of Hot Springs, Arkansas). I think we intend to go with a heat pump because most of our winter is mild above (40 degrees or so with about four or five total weeks that are really cold), but we want to have a heat source for when it is really cold. Plus, it's nice to have a heat source you can "back up to" or to just enjoy the ambiance. Any recommendations would be helpful. P.S., where we currently live in Arkansas has a pellet plant.

We have a wood burning stove in our main house and a heat pump also with propane backup ( very expensive!) We have good access to firewood and also have long periods of time that our power is out every winter, so it's a great fit.

we also have a vacation home on the water that is heated with a pellet stove. the fireplace was beyond saving so it was easy and much less expensive than repairing the chimney. It is a lot easier to haul bags of pellets there than dealing with messy firewood.