Keep Your Family Warm and Safe—No Matter What

No—it's the exception rather than the rule. Howard is a suburban village with natural gas service from Wisconsin Public Service reaching most neighborhoods, so the overwhelming majority of homes here heat with gas furnaces, not wood. Wood stoves show up mainly on larger, older, or rural-edge properties near the Fox River, or in homes where owners specifically want a non-electric backup heat source. If you're considering one, expect to work with a dealer whose primary business is gas and electric, but who still knows how to size and vent a wood stove correctly.

Because wood installs are infrequent here compared to more rural parts of Brown County, there isn't a deep local price history to quote precisely. Regionally in northeast Wisconsin, a full installation—stove, hearth pad, and Class A chimney through the roof—typically runs $3,500 to $8,000, with the lower end applying to homes that already have masonry fireplace venting to reuse. A trusted local dealer matched through Find My Fireplace can walk your Howard property and give you a firm number based on your home's actual venting situation.

Yes—new wood-burning appliance installations require a building permit through the Village of Howard's building inspection department, and the stove must meet current EPA emissions standards. Unlike some Wisconsin cities dealing with winter inversion smoke problems, Howard has no listed air quality non-attainment concerns, so there are no local burning curtailment periods to worry about. Most dealers who install wood stoves in the area will pull the permit as part of the job.

Northeast Wisconsin's hardwood mix runs heavy on oak, maple, birch, and aspen, and that's what you'll find from firewood sellers around Brown County and the greater Green Bay area. Oak and maple burn longest and hottest and are worth seeking out for overnight burns; birch lights easily and is a good shoulder-season wood; aspen burns fast and is often used as kindling or supplemental fuel rather than a primary heat source.

For most Howard homeowners, gas is the more practical everyday choice—Wisconsin Public Service's natural gas network already reaches most of the village, and a gas fireplace or furnace gives instant heat with no wood storage or ash cleanup. Wood makes the most sense as a deliberate second system: a hedge against the winter power outages that occasionally follow Wisconsin ice storms, or a heat source for a property where you actually enjoy tending a fire. Very few Howard homes rely on wood as their only heat source anymore.

Yes, and that's actually the strongest local argument for one. A properly sized, non-electric wood stove will keep burning and radiating heat with zero grid dependence, which matters when a Brown County ice storm takes down WPS lines for a day or more in the middle of a 9°F cold snap. Just make sure the model you choose doesn't rely on an electric blower for its primary heat output if backup heat is the main reason you're installing it—ask your dealer specifically about convection vs. blower-assisted models.

Both are niche choices in a village this well served by natural gas, but they solve different problems. Wood stoves run on cordwood you can source locally (oak, maple, birch, aspen) and keep working with zero electricity, which is the real advantage during a Brown County outage. Pellet stoves—sourced regionally from brands like Lignetics or Indeck Energy Services—are more convenient to load and burn cleaner, but they need electricity to run the auger and blower, so they shut down in the same outage a wood stove would ride through. If backup heat is your priority, wood is the more resilient option here.

Howard's housing stock is mostly newer suburban construction built after the village's growth boom, so many homes don't have an existing masonry fireplace to retrofit. In those cases, a freestanding stove with new Class A chimney venting is the straightforward path. If your property is one of the older farmhouses on the village's rural edge with an existing fireplace, a wood insert that reuses that chimney with a stainless liner is usually the more cost-effective option—ask a local dealer to check your existing flue before you decide.

Since wood is a small share of the hearth business in this part of Brown County, you want a dealer who still does it regularly rather than one who mostly sells gas fireplaces and occasionally takes a wood job. Look for NFI (National Fireplace Institute) or CSIA-certified installers based in the greater Green Bay area—they're the ones with current experience on Class A chimney runs and EPA-certified stove sizing. Find My Fireplace vets local dealers on exactly this basis before making a match.

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.

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.

For an average home—covering the fireplace, the vent pipe, and basic installation—a budget between $3,900 and $5,500 gives you a lot of options across wood, gas, and pellet. By the time you add finish work, gas line, and electrical, the average complete installation lands between $5,000 and $12,000 all-in. In a remodel or new build, a good rule is to put about 2.5% of the total project cost toward the fireplace.