Will my gas fireplace work when the power is out?
In Arden, a lot of the 1980s-90s homes in Royal Pines and Skyland still have open masonry fireplaces that lose heat rather than make it. Swapping in a sealed gas insert with millivolt or battery-backup ignition gives you real outage heat. Natural-gas mains here stay pressurized when the power's out, so the fuel isn't the limit — the ignition is.
From heat-loser to real heater
Those tired open fireplaces in Arden's established Royal Pines and Skyland neighborhoods are working against you — an open masonry firebox pulls warm room air up the chimney and can run a net heat loss. Drop a sealed gas insert into that same opening and it becomes a genuine heater, commonly 70 percent efficient or better. Choose a millivolt or battery-backup insert and it also becomes outage heat: it lights and burns when the grid is down, which the open hearth could never promise.
Natural gas keeps flowing
Arden's homes sit on natural-gas mains, and those mains stay pressurized when a storm takes out the electric grid — so your fuel supply isn't the worry. What decides whether you have heat in an outage is the ignition: a millivolt valve needs no electricity, a battery-backup unit switches to batteries on its own, and only a plug-in electronic-only unit leaves you cold. Any insert and liner is licensed work we permit through Buncombe County.
One caveat, one call
The blower is the single part that always needs power, so outage heat off an insert is radiant rather than fan-forced — still enough to hold a room. If you've been meaning to fix a drafty fireplace and want outage resilience out of the deal, an insert does both at once. Arden is fifteen minutes south of our showroom. Call (828) 545-0525 or bring your fireplace details by.
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.