WOODSTOVE Buyer's Guide

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Most stoves now feature airwashed glass doors. This is Woodstock Soapstone's Keystone stove.

Whether you decide to make wood your primary heating fuel or just want to spend winter evenings around a warm, flickering fire, you'll need to choose from a bewildering array of options: elegant enameled woodstoves, high-efficiency fireplaces, furnaces or even cookstoves. Here's what you need to help you make the right choice, including a comprehensive list of stove models, sizes, prices and other details.

The benefits of home heating with wood are numerous: comfort, beauty, independence, security and environmental responsibility. Surely the most discussed advantage is the promise of cost savings compared with the mainstream alternatives. Although there are many variables involved, you can almost certainly save money by heating with wood if there are forests in your region and you don't live in a city. If the recent volatility of oil, gas and electricity prices provides a hint of the future, the savings could increase in the years ahead. As long as you enjoy managing the firewood supply and the fire, you will be a successful full-time wood burner.

I've not only heated with wood for nearly 30 years, wood burning also has been my life's work for almost as long. I've heated with rusted-out cookstoves, sooty furnaces and gleaming enameled cast-iron heaters. I've worked as a welder, stove designer, wood-energy bureaucrat, dealer, trainer and writer. And I've tried out eight different stoves in the 12 years since we built our present house.

The first decision you'll have to make is whether to shop for a central or space heater. The two main advantages of a central furnace or boiler is that it can maintain the entire house at an even temperature and keep the mess of firewood and ash out of sight in a utility room. But one big disadvantage is that the beauty of the fire is hidden behind a, steel door. Furnaces and boilers also tend to be large, crude and inefficient, which, unless your house is also large and inefficient, can mean a smoky, smelly, overheated home. In other words, furnaces and boilers work best when called upon to meet a big heating load like a very large or leaky house. It pains me to say this as one who started his wood-heat career working on central wood furnaces, but I don't usually recommend furnaces and boilers because they have not kept pace technologically with the advances of woodstoves or of North American housing.

If you live in a reasonably well-constructed house of average size built in the last 30 years or so, you probably can heat the whole place with a single woodstove, provided it is located and installed right. The woodstove is by far the most popular form of wood heating. Why? Because stoves are the most economical and flexible option, and country folks, being practical and thrifty, have figured this out. What they've found is a stove located in the living area keeps that space cozy while other parts of the house, such as the basement and bedrooms, stay cooler. This selective space heating suits people who like their bedrooms cooler, and they save a lot of energy in the bargain. While there are other options within the space heating category, I will focus on woodstoves because of their overwhelming popularity.