Does a standing pilot fireplace work better in a power outage than electronic ignition?
At Waynesville's 2,640 feet, where the heating season runs about three weeks longer than Asheville's, a standing pilot fireplace is real insurance — it lights and heats with the grid completely down, running on the millivolts its own pilot flame produces. Electronic ignition needs power to spark unless it's carrying battery backup. The colder and longer your winter, the more that distinction earns its keep.
You lean on the hearth harder up here
Waynesville sits ten to fifteen degrees colder than the lower WNC towns, and homes at this elevation depend on their fireplaces more days of the year — which means an ignition that quits in an outage fails you more often. The older Hazelwood housing stock makes this sharper still: a lot of those homes have drafty open masonry fireboxes that actually pull warm air out of the room and up the flue. Converting one to a sealed gas insert with a standing pilot does two jobs at once — it stops the draft and gives you heat that doesn't care whether the power's on. Fuel here is mixed: natural gas serves parts of town while many homes up the slopes run on propane, and a millivolt unit works identically on either. The Valor H5, pure radiant with no blower to lose, is built to hold heat through a full grid-down stretch.
Haywood County permits and a truck that carries the part
Every gas install in Waynesville is permitted through Haywood County, and we meet the inspector — extending or running a gas line is licensed work, not something a furniture showroom or a mason can legally connect. Because we're 35 minutes west of the Emma Road showroom, we stock the common pilot, thermocouple, and thermopile parts on the truck, so most repairs get fixed in a single visit rather than waiting on a return trip. If backup heat is the goal, book the annual service in early fall — before the first cold snap, not during it. Call (828) 545-0525.
Fireplace help in Waynesville
We install and service fireplaces throughout Waynesville and the rest of Haywood County — just 35 minutes west from our Asheville-area showroom.
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