JEFFERSON VALLEY, N.Y. � Fire Glow Distributors Inc., a store in this hamlet in the Westchester County suburb of Yorktown Heights, has pellet stoves on back order. Tree trimmers for the utility company in Orange and Rockland Counties, used to scavengers in pickup trucks, have spotted Mercedes-Benzes trailing their crews to load logs into their (carefully lined) trunks.

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Librado Romero/The New York Times

John Cerullo, center, who trims trees for utilities, says wood seekers trail the crews.

And in Spring Valley, a village in Rockland County, landscapers like John Wickes are being pestered for the scrap branches they had to pay to dump just a few months ago.

�There are wood wars,� said Mr. Wickes, a third-generation co-owner of Ira Wickes, a family arborist business founded in 1929. �People are desperate to look for ways to heat their homes cheaply.�

After a summer of high oil and gas prices, suburb dwellers around New York, and across the country, are going low-tech in hopes of reducing their energy bills this winter.

Shipments of pellet stoves, which can be inserted into a fireplace, more than tripled in the first half of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association; deliveries of wood stoves have jumped 54 percent. In the New York suburbs, the going rate for a cord of wood is $225, up from $175 last year, and the price of pellets, usually made from compressed sawdust, which has been scarce because of a slowdown in homebuilding, is also up (some people also burn shelled corn, peanuts, cotton and even cherry or olive pits).

Homeowners, not just in rural areas but also in the suburbs, are scrounging for wood, getting permits to cut in parks, hitting up tree-cutting crews and striking deals with neighbors.

Wood and wood-burning heating stoves go through spasms of popularity whenever oil and gas prices shoot up, most recently in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. But this year�s run-up in prices was so rapid and sustained that people started planning for the coming winter not long after last winter�s snow melted.

�Sales never slowed down in May, June and July in the Northeast,� said Alan Trusler, the vice president of sales at Hearth and Home Technologies, which has doubled production of wood and pellet stoves at its factories in Pennsylvania and Washington State. �It�s really fueled by economics.�

Residential heating oil prices during the coming season, October to March, are projected to average $4.13 per gallon, an increase of about 25 percent over last heating season, according to a forecast published on Tuesday by the federal Energy Information Adminis