Find your fireplace across the Albert region.

All four fuels are genuinely in play here, and the right call depends more on your street than your climate zone. Wood remains deeply rooted—sugar maple, yellow birch, and red maple all season well and burn hot, and with no province-wide burning restriction, plenty of households still treat wood as primary heat through a five-to-six-month season. Gas is a solid option where the regional utility reaches, mainly the Riverview-Moncton corridor; further out toward Alma or Hopewell Cape, propane usually fills that role instead. Pellet stoves get real support from New Brunswick suppliers like Groupe Savoie and Shaw Resources, and they suit anyone who wants wood-stove heat without the splitting and stacking. Electric fireplaces are supplemental almost everywhere—useful for a bedroom, a basement, or ambiance in a home already heated by wood or gas, but not sized to carry a winter on their own.

Yes. Installation goes through your municipal building department—Riverview, Hillsborough, Salisbury, and the smaller communities each handle their own permitting—and the work has to meet the CSA B365 installation code. On top of the building permit, most insurers in New Brunswick will ask for a WETT inspection before they'll cover a wood-burning appliance, especially on an older home or a used stove being installed in a new spot. Gas installations need a licensed gas fitter and a separate gas permit. Most of the retailers we help homeowners find handle this paperwork as part of the install, so it's rarely something you're chasing down on your own.

It depends on where in the region you are. Natural gas service does reach parts of the Albert region, concentrated around Riverview and the corridor toward Moncton, and homes on those lines can run a gas fireplace or insert off the mains. Once you're out toward Hillsborough's rural edges, Salisbury, Alma, or the Fundy National Park side of things, propane is the more realistic option and most gas-fireplace installs there run on a tank rather than a line. Either way, a local dealer can tell you in a few minutes whether your address sits on a gas line or needs a propane setup—it's the first thing they check before recommending a unit.

The region's forests run heavy to sugar maple, yellow birch, and red maple, with white spruce mixed in—an excellent firewood lineup, since the hardwoods split clean and burn long while the spruce catches quickly for shoulder-season fires. Most households source wood locally, either through a firewood dealer or by cutting on crown land through a New Brunswick Natural Resources district office. Because there's no province-wide burning restriction here, unlike areas with winter air-quality curtailments, choosing wood as a primary heat source is a straightforward decision rather than something you need to plan around seasonal burn bans.

Most Albert-region hearth retailers carry two or three fuel types rather than specializing narrowly, which fits how a lot of local households actually heat—wood or pellet as the workhorse, with a gas or electric unit somewhere else in the house for convenience. A multi-fuel dealer lets you compare a working wood stove, a gas insert, and a pellet unit side by side and talk through what genuinely fits your address, whether that's a gas line in Riverview or a propane tank out near Alma. We'll help you find the retailer whose lineup and service area actually fit your project.

Costs shift with fuel type and how much venting or gas-line work is involved. Wood stove and insert installs typically run $4,000–$8,500 CAD, more if a full chimney rebuild is part of the job. Gas fireplaces and inserts usually land between $4,500–$10,000, depending on whether you're extending a gas line or converting an existing hearth to propane. Pellet stove and insert installs generally run $4,000–$7,000. Electric fireplaces are the outlier—$400–$2,500 for the unit, plus a few hundred dollars in labour for anything beyond a simple plug-in placement. The region and fuel pages above break these numbers down further with local retailer pricing.

Wrong question—and the industry's favorite way to confuse you. More BTUs isn't better if the fireplace cooks you out of the room you spent thousands to enjoy. Think in terms you can verify: how many square feet the unit heats, whether it's primary or backup heat, and whether you want it running overnight. Those three answers size a fireplace correctly every time.

In my own home, the room with the fireplace has never been the same—it became the social hub. Game nights, holidays, date nights after the kids are down: the fire is where the house gathers. There's a reason people in this industry joke that we're really in the romance and entertainment business. You won't wonder whether you'll use it; you'll wonder how the room worked before.

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.

Match the fuel to your life, not the other way around. Wood: lowest fuel cost and total power-outage independence, but you're hauling and stacking. Gas: press a button, set a thermostat, no maintenance to speak of. Pellet: wood economics with automatic feeding, in exchange for weekly cleaning and a need for electricity. Electric: plugs in anywhere with honest supplemental heat. Nobody regrets the fuel that fits how they actually live.