As the first week of summer draws to a close, patio furniture lines the storefront of Finest Hearth & Home and gas grills are for sale, ready for the Fourth of July barbecue.

While shoppers expect to see the displays of summer merchandise, it is not the sunshine or a neighborhood gathering that lures them to the Hogan Road store in Bangor.

It’s the pellet stoves.

“I’d say about 90 percent of the people in the door are looking for a pellet stove,” said Mark Strang, a salesman at the Bangor store. “It’s either buy something else [other than oil] now and next year you can pay for a cruise, or you can buy oil.”

Heating oil prices have reached about $4.50 a gallon, and many Maine homeowners now are searching for alternative fuel sources. Residents are no longer trying to save dollars to take the children to Disney World; they are just trying to stash away pennies to pay the oil bill.

As part of the switch to alternative energy sources, pellet stoves have become the latest trend in store layaway items. Since startup costs can be overwhelming to some families, Mark Higgins, a partner of Evergreen Home Solutions in Ellsworth, said his company tries to work with customers. Stoves range from $2,100 to $4,500, and the average installation cost is around $500, he said.

Several patrons come in weekly to drop off a couple hundred dollars toward the eventual purchase of a stove, Higgins said. For those who want to buy now, pellet stoves are among homes, cars, boats and furniture as an acceptable item to finance.

“We have a couple of different companies we can do financing with,” said Higgins. “I can tell you in five minutes whether you’re approved, just like a furniture store.”

Scott Arthurs of Orrington has his own financing plan.

“We’re going to put it on the credit card,” said Arthurs, who was shopping for a stove at Finest Hearth & Home this week. “My father gave me the best piece of advice – if you don’t owe anything, you don’t own anything.”

The brands, styles and features of pellet stoves vary just as much as the funding. The average stove has an 80 percent to 85 percent efficiency rating, and a ton of pellets, which is the most common unit of measure, costs $219 at Dysart’s in Hermon, according to the company Web site. At this price and efficiency rating, wood pellets generate twice the amount of British Thermal Units, or Btu, as No. 2 heating oil.

If heating oil continues to climb and pellets remain stable, in some cases a pellet stove can pay for itself in less than a year, Higgins said.

Consumers must be convinced of the long-term payoff.

Last Saturday, Strang said he felt like a college professor. His course: Wood Pellets 101. Nearly 20 customers gathered around the pellet stove display as he explained features and costs. He educated, and he sold. On one day in May, Strang said, he sold 19 pellet stoves, breaking a store sales record.

When a tractor-trailer truck of merchandise pulled into Finest Hearth & Home one evening this week, Strang estimated that between six and eight stoves were in the shipment.

“They are getting to the store, but those were sold six to eight weeks ago,” Strang said.

In the past few years manufacturers have begun to focus on the aesthetics of the stoves, Higgins said. Designs have evolved so much, he considers them pieces of art.

Pellet stove owner Allen Nygren of Hampden said the most attractive part of pellet heat, aside from the cost, is the low maintenance.

“The beauty of it is it feeds itself and it gets rid of ash itself,” Nygren said.

Burning pellets is a compromise between chopping, storing and loading stick wood into a stove, and simply turning up your oil heat thermostat, Higgins said. While lifting the 40-pound pellet bags and loading the machine is work, it’s nothing compared to splitting wood and lugging sticks in and out of the house.

Nygren, who has owned two stoves for a couple of months now – one for his home and the other for his business in Hermon – said the pellet craze is simple economics: People don’t want to pay the high oil prices if other options are available.

trobbins@bangordailynews.net

990-8074