Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

Not really, no. Long Lake's small lots and heavy reliance on Xcel Energy's natural gas service mean most homes heat with gas furnaces or electric baseboard rather than solid fuel. Wood installs still happen—typically in older homes near the lake, detached structures, or as intentional backup heat—but they're the exception rather than the norm here, unlike more rural parts of Hennepin County or greater Minnesota where wood heat is standard.

It's not the climate—with a long, demanding heating season and average winter lows near 6°F, Long Lake is plenty cold enough to justify wood heat on paper. It's the setting. Long Lake is a dense inner-ring suburb with small lots and close setbacks, and natural gas service through Northern States Power reaches nearly every home already. When gas is already piped in and lot lines don't leave much room for chimney clearances or wood storage, most homeowners default to the furnace they've already got rather than adding a wood-burning appliance.

In most cases, yes—it's uncommon, not prohibited. You'll need a building permit through the City of Long Lake Building Department (or Hennepin County if your property falls under county jurisdiction), and the stove itself needs to meet current EPA New Source Performance Standards. Because these installs are infrequent in town, expect your installer to spend extra time on a site visit confirming clearances to combustibles and chimney routing—tight suburban lots require more careful planning than a rural install with open acreage.

Oak, maple, birch, and aspen are the common species across Hennepin County, and all four burn well in a modern EPA-certified stove once properly seasoned. Oak and maple are dense hardwoods that burn longest and are ideal for overnight loads; birch lights easily and burns hot but faster; aspen is a lighter, faster-burning wood often used for shoulder-season fires. Local firewood suppliers in the western metro typically sell seasoned cordwood by the cord or half-cord—ask about moisture content, since properly dried wood (below 20%) matters even more for the small number of installs that go into tightly built Long Lake homes.

It's one of the more legitimate reasons to install wood heat in a town like Long Lake. With winter lows averaging around 6°F, a multi-day outage during an ice storm or blizzard is a real risk to pipes and comfort, and a wood stove is the one heating appliance that keeps working with the grid down—no blower motor, no ignition module, no electricity required at all. If backup heat is your main driver, prioritize a simple non-catalytic stove with a manual damper over anything with electronic controls, and size it to the one room you'd actually want to hold a fire in during an emergency.

The physics are the same, but the site constraints aren't. Rural Hennepin County properties often have the acreage to place a wood stove or outdoor furnace with generous clearances and easy access for cutting and stacking firewood. Long Lake's in-town lots are smaller and closer together, so chimney height, roof penetration location, and clearance-to-combustibles rules get more scrutiny from the building department, and there's less room for a woodshed or a season's worth of stacked cordwood. It's still doable—it just takes a more careful site plan.

Because wood installs are uncommon in town, there isn't a well-established local price benchmark the way there is for gas or electric work here. Cost depends heavily on whether you're venting through an existing masonry chimney, running new Class A pipe through a roof, and what clearance or hearth pad modifications your specific lot requires. Rather than quote a generic range that doesn't reflect Long Lake's tighter lots, we'll connect you with a local dealer who can walk your property and give you a firm number based on your actual chimney path and clearances.

Pellet stoves face the same rarity problem wood does here—they're not commonly installed in Long Lake, for the same lot-size and gas-infrastructure reasons. Regional pellet brands like Lignetics and Somerset Pellet Fuel are available for anyone who wants one, but pellet stoves need electricity to run the auger and blower, so they lose the one advantage that makes wood appealing here in the first place: heating through a power outage. If backup heat during a storm is your goal, wood is the more logical choice for a Long Lake home.

For day-to-day heating, most Long Lake homes are better served by their existing gas furnace or electric system through Northern States Power, at a residential rate around 16.98 cents per kWh—running a whole home on electric resistance heat through a 6°F average winter low gets expensive fast. Wood makes more sense as a supplemental or backup source: a stove in one main living space, or emergency heat for the handful of days a year when the grid or the gas line goes down. Few Long Lake homeowners replace their primary system with wood; most who install it are adding a second, independent heat source.

Open fireplaces suck—literally. As the fire burns, it consumes air your furnace already paid to heat and pulls it out through the chimney, so the house is actually colder after the fire goes out than before you lit it. An insert fixes this: it seals the chimney, puts fixed glass across the front, and turns that hole in your house into a real heat source.

An insert does two things: it seals the chimney completely, so you stop losing air you already paid to heat, and it radiates warmth into the room through the firebox and glass. Most add a heat-exchange fan that pulls cool room air underneath, wraps it around the hot firebox, and pushes it back out warm. Your home is more efficient before you've even lit the first fire.

It's a visit where a hearth professional measures your space, confirms the model you picked actually works in your home, and walks the specs—framing, gas line, venting, finish work—before anything is ordered. Some details you just can't know until you see the house. Never make a down payment without one; it's the single most-skipped step that burns buyers.

On average, a fireplace adds back to the home about the same amount you spent installing it. Add the monthly savings from heating the rooms you actually use instead of the whole house—often hundreds of dollars a year—and the value case is strong before you even count what a fire does for how your family uses the room.