These suddenly trendy appliances burn small pellets - about the size of a pencil eraser - that are made of compacted sawdust and sold in 40-pound bags. Expect to pay $3,000 to $5,000 for the stove and the installation, which takes two or three hours.
And hurry: These stoves are going fast.
"A lot of our manufacturers are out of stock," says Bill Ryan, owner of the Stove Shop in Phoenixville. "We're also backlogged six weeks on installation."
Ryan says most people use pellet stoves to heat the family room and the rooms nearby so they can turn the thermostat on their furnace way down. You'll need about 3 tons of pellets each winter at about $300 a ton.
Solar panels. Generally not a choice for home heating, except among gung-ho eco-pioneers. Still, there's plenty of sun in the Delaware Valley to heat your household's water or even generate maybe half of its electricity.
A solar hot water system costs about $6,000 to buy and install. It takes just a couple days once you have the permits and materials in hand, but the backlog for panels can be a month or two.
The average solar-electric system costs about $65,000 and could require six months' lead time or more to line up permits and order solar panels.
Pennsylvania is about to launch a program that will cover up to 35 percent of the costs to buy and install either type of system. (See "Green Stuff for Greening.") Visit to check other states' incentives and plug numbers into a calculator for estimating costs.
Geothermal heat pumps. These systems circulate fluid through pipes in the ground, where the temperature stays in the 50s all winter. Then, they convert the underground heat into hot-air heat for your house. In summer, the relatively cool ground temperature turns the system into an air conditioner.
