Wood-burning insert vs pellet insert — which should I put in my fireplace?
In Black Mountain, the Helene outage settled this for a lot of Swannanoa Valley families: the wood inserts kept throwing heat while pellet units sat dark waiting on power. If backup heat is the point, choose wood without hesitation. A pellet insert is genuinely pleasant everyday, but plan on it being useless in a multi-day outage.
What the outage taught the valley
When the grid went down for days across the Swannanoa Valley, the homes that stayed warm were the ones with a working wood hearth. A wood insert needs nothing but fuel and a match, and heavily wooded lots around Montreat and Ridgecrest mean plenty of families heat on wood off their own land. A pellet insert depends on its auger and igniter — battery backup buys you a short outage, not a long one — and on the store still having pellets when everyone needs them at once.
Cold mornings favor an overnight burn
Temperature inversions in the valley make Black Mountain mornings 10 to 15 degrees colder than Asheville, and frost lingers later into spring. A wood insert's overnight coals mean you're not starting cold in the worst hour of the day. We're only about 15 minutes east of the showroom, so service is quick either way. Every insert we set gets a correctly sized liner, and we pull the Buncombe County permit and meet the inspector. Call (828) 545-0525.
Fireplace help in Black Mountain
We install and service fireplaces throughout Black Mountain and the rest of Buncombe County — just 15 minutes east from our Asheville-area showroom.