Pellet stoves don ' t have this problem , just wood stoves . A pellet stove controls heat output by gradually feeding in small amounts of fuel , so you get a slow steady release of heat all day . It should be cheaper even with cheap electricity , but you need to be buying pellets in bulk by the ton , not bags of them from the store . I ' m not sure how cheap your electricity is though . Fill in your price for electrity and pellets here and see how well it lines up with your experience a wood stove , it is a pain in the butt to keep manually adding small amounts of wood over and over , so instead people put a lot of wood in there . Then they think man it is really hot , I must be wasting a lot of heat going out the chimney , I ' ll cut the air flow so it dies down and save my wood . But this has the opposite effect . Now without enough oxygen , the wood gasifies instead of burning , and you send about 45 ths of the energy content of the wood up the chimney as unburned carbon monoxide and hydrogen . Then they go It takes me 12 cords of wood to heat my house ! Wood stoves are so expensive ! . But they could be using 4 cords if they would leave the dampers open instead of choking the fire . For some reason , no amount of explaining this can convince most people to leave the dampers open though .