What's the best fireplace for a vacation home or second home that sits empty part of the year?
In Arden the answer is usually a conversion, not an addition. The open masonry fireplaces in Royal Pines and Skyland's 1980s-and-'90s homes pull warm air out of an empty house all winter — a sealed gas insert on Arden's natural-gas service turns that standing liability into low-maintenance heat that runs even through an outage.
Your open fireplace works against you while you're gone
The tired, drafty open fireplaces common to Arden's 1980s-and-'90s housing stock don't just underperform — an open flue moves air whether or not there's a fire, so a closed-up house spends all winter exhaling its heated air up the chimney and inhaling cold drafts down it. An open masonry fireplace can actually run a net heat loss. For a home someone lives in, that's an efficiency problem; for one that sits, it's a standing tax on the heating bill and a frozen-pipe risk in a hard snap. Skyland's valley setting funnels cold air down the Hendersonville Road corridor on winter nights, which only sharpens the math.
The conversion that fixes it
A sealed gas insert — Napoleon's Oakville X4 or Kozy Heat's Chaska 25L, set with a correctly sized liner — closes the old flue permanently and turns the firebox into the most efficient heater in the house; inserts commonly run 70 percent efficient or better. On Arden's natural-gas service there's no tank to think about, and with battery-backup or millivolt ignition the insert keeps heating through a power cut with nobody home. See our guide to [converting a wood fireplace to gas](/guides/convert-wood-fireplace-to-gas) for how the two conversion paths differ.
Fifteen minutes from our shop
Arden is one of our shortest drives — 15 minutes from 629 Emma Rd — which makes ownership from a distance easy: annual tune-ups (from $189) each late summer, and most repairs finished in one trip because common parts ride on the truck. Permits go through Buncombe County; we pull them and meet the inspector. Call (828) 545-0525.
Fireplace help in Arden
We install and service fireplaces throughout Arden and the rest of Buncombe County — just 15 minutes south from our Asheville-area showroom.