Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

Not typically—natural gas is the standard heating fuel in this part of Luzerne County, and most West Pittston homes are set up for it. Wood stoves and inserts show up here as a secondary or backup choice: a homeowner with an older Victorian fireplace who wants real heat instead of a decorative hearth, or someone who wants a heat source that still works when the power goes out. If that's your situation, a wood stove is a perfectly practical project—it's just not the default the way it might be in a more rural, timber-heavy county.

Expect somewhere in the $4,000 to $8,500 range for most projects, with the lower end covering a wood insert dropped into an existing masonry fireplace—common in West Pittston's older housing stock—and the higher end covering a freestanding stove that needs new Class A chimney pipe run through a roof or wall. Exact pricing depends on the unit, chimney condition, and whether your home's existing flue can be reused. A local dealer will give you a firm number after seeing the fireplace or the spot where the stove would go.

Many houses in West Pittston's older neighborhoods are modest two-story homes with defined rooms rather than open floor plans, so a small to mid-size stove—rated for 1,000 to 1,800 square feet—is usually plenty if you're heating a living room or den as supplemental warmth. If you're trying to heat more of the house, or you have one of the borough's larger Victorian homes with higher ceilings and less insulation, a mid-size stove with a longer burn time will keep up better on nights near that 20°F average winter low. A local dealer can size it properly during an in-home visit.

Yes—new wood-burning appliance installations require a building permit, and in a borough this size that typically means a call to the West Pittston Borough building or code office before work begins. Most established hearth dealers handle the permit application and inspection scheduling as part of the installation, so it's rarely something you have to manage yourself. Because there's no regional air quality non-attainment designation here, you won't run into the burn curtailment rules that some other parts of Pennsylvania and neighboring states enforce.

If your West Pittston home already has a working masonry fireplace—common in the borough's older Victorian and post-war housing—a wood insert is usually the better fit. It slides into the existing opening, uses the existing chimney with a new stainless liner, and turns a fireplace that's mostly heat-loss into a real heat source. A freestanding stove makes more sense if you don't have an existing fireplace, or if you're setting up a heat source in a basement, garage, or add-on room where you'd be building chimney and hearth clearances from scratch.

Luzerne County doesn't have the kind of nearby national forest land that makes cheap self-cut permits practical, so most West Pittston households buy seasoned cordwood from local firewood dealers rather than cutting their own. Oak, hickory, maple, and cherry are the hardwoods you'll most commonly find sold by the cord in this part of the Wyoming Valley—all dense, good-burning wood that produces solid heat output and a long burn once properly seasoned (6 months to a year, split and stacked).

It's one of the more practical reasons to install one here. West Pittston sits along the Susquehanna River, and the borough has a real history with flooding (Hurricane Agnes in 1972 remains a benchmark event locally) as well as winter ice storms that can knock out PPL Electric service for days. A wood stove or insert doesn't need electricity to produce heat, unlike a furnace or most gas appliances with electronic ignition, so it's a genuine hedge against exactly the kind of outage this area occasionally sees.

Once a year, ideally before burning season starts in the fall—the Chimney Safety Institute of America recommends an annual inspection for any wood-burning appliance, and that holds whether you're burning heavily as a primary heat source or occasionally for ambiance. Given how few homes in West Pittston use wood as their main heat source, most local owners are firmly in the lighter-use category, but creosote still builds up over a season of fires and a proper sweep catches it before it becomes a chimney fire risk.

For most homes here, gas wins on convenience: it's the standard fuel in the borough, it's instant, and it doesn't require hauling or stacking cordwood. Wood wins in one specific scenario—you want a heat source that works when the power and gas infrastructure don't, or you have an existing fireplace you want to actually use for heat rather than just looks. If you're weighing the two, it's worth asking a local dealer to walk you through both for your specific fireplace or room, since West Pittston's older housing stock often has quirks—an existing flue, an odd hearth footprint—that steer the decision one way or the other.

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.

New wood stoves are 70%+ efficient, so far less heat goes up the flue—which also means less draft to get a fire established. The rule: build a genuinely hot fire for about 45 minutes before you choke it down. Skip that and you get smoke in the room, creosote in the chimney, and a fire that never takes off. Most performance complaints trace straight back to this.

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.

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.