Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

No, not really—and it's worth saying plainly. Allentown's dense rowhome and twin-home neighborhoods, combined with widespread natural gas service, mean the vast majority of local homeowners who want a fireplace or supplemental heat source choose gas. Wood stoves and inserts still show up in Allentown, but usually in specific situations: an older detached home with an existing masonry fireplace, a property on the edge of Lehigh County with more land, or a household that wants a heat source that works without electricity. If you're in one of those situations, it's a legitimate option—just not the default one here.

Because wood stoves are a niche request in this market, fewer local hearth shops stock them compared to gas units, but installations still generally run in the $4,000 to $9,000 range depending on the stove, whether you're venting through an existing chimney or need new Class A pipe, and any hearth pad work required for code clearance. Homes without an existing chimney—common in Allentown's newer suburbs—tend to land on the higher end once full venting is factored in. Because demand is lower here than in more wood-reliant parts of Pennsylvania, it's worth confirming a dealer has real wood-stove installation experience, not just gas.

Oak, hickory, maple, and cherry are the hardwoods most commonly sold by firewood dealers around the Lehigh Valley, and they're good, dense, long-burning options for a stove. Unlike parts of the country with national forest land nearby, there isn't a large public timber tract within easy reach of Allentown for self-cutting permits, so most local wood-stove owners buy seasoned cordwood from regional suppliers rather than cutting their own. Expect to pay by the cord, and buy early—seasoned hardwood delivered in spring or summer has had time to dry out before the first cold snap.

Yes. New wood stove installations require a building permit through the City of Allentown's permitting office (or Lehigh County if you're outside city limits), and the unit itself needs to meet current EPA 2020 NSPS emissions standards. Because wood stove permits are less frequently processed here than gas fireplace permits, it helps to work with an installer who has pulled one recently and knows the inspection requirements—clearance to combustibles and proper Class A chimney termination height are the two items inspectors check most closely.

For the narrow floor plans and existing masonry fireplaces common in neighborhoods like Old Allentown, a wood insert usually makes more sense than a freestanding stove—it uses the chimney you already have and doesn't eat into limited floor space. Compact, high-efficiency inserts from Pacific Energy, Regency, or Jøtul work well in these smaller footprints. For a detached home with more room and a desire for longer burn times, a larger freestanding stove from Blaze King or Lopi is worth considering, though given how few homes in Allentown proper are set up for it, a local retailer's in-home assessment matters more here than in wood-heavy markets.

If your home dates to the early 1900s—common in Old Allentown and parts of the West End—there's a decent chance you already have a masonry fireplace, even if it's been unused for years. An insert conversion reuses that existing chimney with a new stainless liner, turning a drafty, inefficient fireplace into a real heat source. This is one of the more sensible wood-heat projects in a city where gas dominates, since you're not adding new masonry—you're upgrading something that's already there. A local installer can inspect the flue to confirm it's sound before recommending a specific insert.

Yes, and this is the main reason some Allentown homeowners install one despite gas being so widely available. A traditional wood stove needs no electricity to produce heat—no igniter, no blower required to function, though a blower does help circulate warm air if you have one. During ice storms and nor'easters that occasionally knock out PPL Electric service for a day or more, a wood stove keeps a room, or even a whole small home, warm when the furnace blower and gas fireplace ignition are both offline. It's a niche use case here, but a real one.

For most Allentown homes, gas wins, and it isn't close. Natural gas service is broadly available across the city, gas fuel relevance here is rated standard, and a direct-vent gas fireplace or insert offers instant heat with no wood storage, hauling, or ash cleanup—a real advantage in rowhomes and twins with little outdoor storage space. Wood makes more sense only in specific cases: a home with an existing unused masonry fireplace, a property outside the dense urban core with room to store cordwood, or a household that specifically wants heat that works when the power is out. If none of those apply to you, gas is almost certainly the simpler, more practical choice.

Both are minority choices in this market compared to gas, so the decision usually comes down to what you're optimizing for. A wood stove runs on cordwood, needs no electricity, and works during a PPL outage—the tradeoff is storage space and hauling. A pellet stove burns bagged pellets from regional producers like Energex, Hamer Pellet Fuel, or Greene Team Pellet Fuel, is easier to load and maintain, and burns cleaner, but it needs electricity to run the auger and blower, so it won't help you during an outage unless it's paired with a battery backup. For an Allentown home without a strong reason to go with either, gas remains the more common default—but between the two wood-fuel options, wood is the better fit if outage-proof heat matters to you.

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 is a fireplace that slides into a pre-existing wood-burning fireplace—if you don't have one, there's nothing to insert it into. A zero-clearance fireplace is built into a framed wall, which makes it the answer for remodels and new construction. Simple test: existing masonry fireplace means insert; blank or framed wall means zero-clearance.

Yes—by creating a comfort zone. A furnace heats every square foot of the house just to warm the one room you're in; a gas fireplace on low burns roughly a sixth of the gas a typical furnace does. Set the furnace around 55–60 degrees as a baseline, then heat the rooms your family actually uses. Families who heat this way commonly save $20–$60 a month.

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.