When I first started talking about getting a pellet stove multiple people told me I'd need a back up power source or I'd be without heat in a power outage.
I've not lost power in the winter for more than a few minutes in the nearly 30 years I've lived in my house.
My first couple of years here, Other than a couple of brownouts/couple of minute outages, I had maybe two outages that lasted under a couple of hours. For some reason this year I have had going on a dozen outages that lasted 1-4 hours. still not critical, but there must be something wonky going on with the infrastructure in my area.
Anyway, glad for the woodstove, as four hours in DEC can cool the house down pretty fast, and under 8-ish hours, it's not worth it for me to roll out the generator and hook that up, especially at zero dark thirty. A big plus is my recent discovery that the gas fireplace switch works when the power is out. Even without the blower, the gas fireplace can heat up the living room pretty well, and its placement relative to the wood stove helps get heat into the end of the house that doesn't easily catch wood stove heat, especially when the HVAC fan* is off in an outage. Between the two of them, I can easily keep the house comfortable without power.
*I've been running the HVAC fan on "circulate" (where it only comes on every few hours) for almost a year now, and have noticed a difference in both heating/cooling distribution within the house with I think a reduction in HVAC use. I think the slightly higher monthly electric use is canceled out by HVAC savings.
