Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

For a lot of Pittston housing stock, not really—the borough's rowhouses and duplexes were built close together with shared walls and limited roofline access, which makes running a proper Class A chimney and maintaining code clearances difficult or impossible in some units. Where it does work well is on larger single-family lots at the edges of the borough, or on rural Luzerne County properties outside town, where there's room for a masonry chimney or an exterior-run flue. A local installer can walk your specific house and tell you in fifteen minutes whether it's workable.

Oak, hickory, maple, and cherry are the common hardwoods across Luzerne County's surrounding woodlots and the forested hills toward the Endless Mountains and Poconos. All four are dense, high-BTU firewood once properly seasoned—oak and hickory in particular burn long and hot, which matters if you're running a stove as genuine supplemental or backup heat rather than occasional ambiance.

Yes—any new wood-burning appliance install requires a building permit through the City of Pittston's code enforcement process, and the stove itself needs to meet current EPA emissions standards. There are no local air quality non-attainment issues or winter inversion restrictions here the way there are in some western cities, so once the unit is installed and permitted, there's no burning-season advisory to track. The permit step mainly exists to confirm clearances, flue sizing, and hearth pad compliance are done right.

The most common reason is backup heat. PPL Electric service in the Wyoming Valley isn't immune to ice storm outages, and a freestanding wood stove is one of the few heat sources that keeps working with the power off—no blower motor, no ignition module, no thermostat that needs electricity. Beyond that, some homeowners on larger lots want a wood stove for a garage or detached workshop, or simply prefer the radiant heat and ambiance of a real fire over a gas insert. It's a minority choice here, but not an irrational one.

There's no single local number the way there might be in a region where most homes already have a chimney—it depends heavily on what your specific house has to start with. A home with an existing masonry chimney in good condition is a much simpler and cheaper install than a home that needs new Class A pipe run through a roof and exterior wall, which is common in rowhouse and duplex construction. A local dealer will need to see the specific house before quoting, but they can usually give you a firm number after a single in-home visit.

For most homes in the borough, natural gas or an electric heat pump running on PPL's residential rate (around 12.3 cents per kWh) is the more practical primary heat source—it fits the existing housing stock without chimney or clearance retrofits. Wood makes sense as a supplemental or backup layer, not usually as the main system, unless you're on a rural Luzerne County property with the space and existing chimney infrastructure to support it. Most Pittston-area homeowners who go with wood are adding it on top of gas or electric, not replacing it.

Firewood suppliers and tree services in the outlying Luzerne County townships typically sell seasoned oak, hickory, maple, and cherry by the cord, with pricing that varies by species mix and how well-seasoned the wood is. If you're heating with wood at all in this area, buying well ahead of the cold season and confirming the wood is properly dried (not green) matters more here than in wood-heavy regions, simply because fewer local suppliers means less competitive pressure on quality.

If your home has an existing masonry fireplace—common in some of Pittston's older single-family houses, less so in the rowhouse stock—a wood insert is often a cleaner path than a freestanding stove, since it uses the chimney you already have and dramatically improves the heat output of what's usually a decorative, drafty opening. A local dealer can inspect the flue and chimney condition to confirm it's a good candidate before recommending a specific insert.

For homeowners who've been through a multi-day PPL outage during an ice storm, the answer is often yes—a wood stove is one of the only heat sources that doesn't depend on the grid, and at 20°F average winter lows, going without heat for days is a real problem, not a minor inconvenience. That said, it's a meaningful investment to make purely as insurance. Some homeowners in this situation opt for a smaller, simpler stove sized for one main room rather than whole-home heating, which keeps both cost and installation complexity down while still solving the outage problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.