Hey Rocco. I think your recommendation for a wood stove is a good one.
Another option is a wood pellet stove which we had when we lived in the Poconos a colder than average winter being in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Let me share the advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
1. Big savings if you buy a truckload of 40-lbs bags of pellets before the winter. If the season’s cost of electricity is $6,000, the cost of propane gas is $3,000. And a pellet stove is $1,500 in pellets.
2. Lugging the bags into your living room or wherever is your central heating point is good exercise and you can pre-stack a few bags in the room.
3. The stoves very hot — very satisfying heat on a very cold day.
Disadvantages:
1. Once a day you need to cool the unit down and clean out the inside of ashes. This keeps the combustion cleaner and more efficient.
2. Twice a year, do a deep cleaning, taking a bristle brush into the air chambers that tend to collect ash.
3. Figure $500 for a technician to come out once a year and fix something that broke in the stove.
4. The stove works on electricity — so you are out of luck if the electric power goes out. The fan unit will consume a fair amount of power in season, too.
5. You may not have a large basement to store the bags for the season. Typically we burned one bag a day and three bags on a super cold day.
6. Remember that the fan that supplies the air to burn the pellets is strong and will be pretty noisy.
7. Finally, the Mrs. may not like the idea of a stove because no matter how careful you are, some dust will spread around the room.
* * *
So there you go.
The good news is that I busted my ass this summer installing a partial solar electric system with batteries and two wood stoves. We still use the pellet stove but are now burning crushed olive pits in it which are less than half the cost of pellets. The downside for most folks here is that to modify and tweak a pellet stove to run right with crushed olive pits costs between $100-150 to have a tech do.
Being a hardcore DIY guy with serious tools I figured out how to do it myself. The stove runs great with the pits but I have to say that modifying the brazier (I bought a second one to modify just for pits) and then adjusting the software parameters until the stove ran well was time consuming - involved a lot of tweaking.
Yep - you do get exercise lugging those bags around. The bags of crushed olive pits are a lot heavier than the wood pellets are. They're 25kg, around 60 lbs a pop and I have to lug them up three flights of stairs. . .
As far as fan noise goes I've tweaked the software to get a good balance between heat distribution and noise so it's not very noticeable except on high.