Which fireplace gives you the most heat for the money?
In Arden, the most heat for the money is sitting unused in your living-room wall: the open masonry fireplaces built into Royal Pines and Skyland homes in the '80s and '90s pull warm air out of the house, and a sealed gas insert on Arden's natural-gas service — Kozy Heat's Chaska 25L with its standard blower is our benchmark — turns that same opening into the hardest-working heater you own.
The fireplace you have is the one costing you
Royal Pines and Skyland are full of 1980s and '90s homes with open masonry fireplaces, and those hearths quietly work against the thermostat — a tired open fireplace pulls warmed air out of the room and up the flue, and can actually run a net heat loss. The most heat for the money in Arden isn't a new fireplace; it's fixing that. A sealed gas insert converts the existing firebox to 70-plus percent efficiency, and with Arden on natural-gas service, fuel is the easy part. The wood-insert version of the same move works too, if you want cordwood's economics.
Kozy Heat's Chaska 25L — blower standard — and Napoleon's Oakville X4 are the two inserts we fit into these fireboxes most, and many conversions are done in a day: liner in, insert set, gas connected, burning by dinner.
Fifteen minutes to see it burning
Skyland and Royal Pines sit 15 minutes south of our showroom at 629 Emma Rd, which means you can stand in front of the exact insert before it goes into your wall. We're a licensed gas contractor — in North Carolina the gas connection is legally our work, not a handyman's — and every Arden job is permitted through Buncombe County and inspected.
After Helene's outages, plenty of neighbors here rethought what a fireplace is for: a sealed gas insert with battery-backup or millivolt ignition heats with the grid down. Call (828) 545-0525 for a free in-home assessment and honest sizing — bigger isn't better, and we'll say so.
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.