Things Are Heating Up
Owner Matthew Abelli
It had been a long few years for Matthew Abelli and his wife — years marked by job changes, a frustrating journey toward parenthood, and years of health issues that culminated with a tumor in his brain.
But Abelli has emerged from all that with a positive diagnosis, a healthy daughter, and his own growing business, Matt’s Pellet Stove Service.
He told BusinessWest about all of that, starting at the beginning — the very beginning, when he was being raised by a divorced mom whom he described as strong-willed and tough.
“She was very do-it-yourself, hands-on, and I picked up a lot of that with her,” he said, recalling how he once repaired a broken toaster for her with a screwdriver and a dose of youthful common sense. “She loves telling that story.”
After studying in the electrical program at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton, Abelli worked in — and was laid off from — an electrician job during the Great Recession, then found himself spending more than 10 years with an HVAC company, installing, servicing, and repairing pellet stoves, wood stoves, and gas appliances, eventually departing around 2017.
“But I kept doing it, whether it was for friends, family, odd jobs, refurbishing units — it’s a big passion of mine,” he noted.
“I was starting to get headaches at work — to the point where I’m like, ‘this is weird.’ You know how sometimes you stand up and your eyes take a second to adjust? Well, I’d do that, but it would take a minute to adjust. And then I would lose my peripheral vision sometimes.”
After a stint as a maintenance technician for Pride, which he found neither challenging or enjoyable, Abelli applied for and eventually secured a custodial job with Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, which he supplemented by working a second maintenance job with Highland Valley Elder Services in Northampton.
And then COVID hit — and so did a major health scare.
“I was starting to get headaches at work — to the point where I’m like, ‘this is weird.’ You know how sometimes you stand up and your eyes take a second to adjust? Well, I’d do that, but it would take a minute to adjust. And then I would lose my peripheral vision sometimes.”
On his wife’s insistence, he got a CT scan that revealed a small blockage and buildup of spinal fluid. The surgery to repair it couldn’t be done locally, so he went to Tufts in Boston. Because of COVID restrictions, his wife couldn’t be with him, which was upsetting, but the surgery was a success — for the moment, anyway.
“When I came back, I felt like a million bucks because I didn’t have that pressure,” he recalled. “They said, ‘come back in a year.’”
The couple did, in January 2022, and an MRI revealed that the blockage seemed a lot larger — in fact, it had tripled in size and was now classified as a brain tumor. Because of the risks of surgery in that location, including blindness — it was very near the optic nerve — Abelli opted for powerful oral chemotherapy and radiation treatments that led to cranial swelling, which was treated with potent steroids.
On top of that stress, his wife, Jennifer, discovered she was pregnant, the culmination of years of trying. Amid all that, an HVAC position came up at the base, which Abelli had wanted. Weakened by his various treatments, he wound up interviewing with sunglasses on because light hurt his eyes.
He got the job, though he continued to struggle with the effects of chemotherapy, while his wife managed her pregnancy. Meanwhile, both were diagnosed with COVID at one point in 2022. But as the year drew to a close, the tumor was shrinking, and Jennifer gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Grace.
Matthew Abelli says he takes pride in keeping pellet stoves clean and safe.
That’s a lot to experience in a short time. But Abelli was about to make another big change.
Home and Hearth
Specifically, he had never lost his passion for working with pellet stoves, and there came a time in 2023 — when Grace was about 6 months old — when Abelli decided he needed another source of income. So he started picking up cleaning and service jobs, and eventually registered Matt’s Pellet Stove Service as a business in 2024.
Today, he has built a clientele of about 200 regular customers, mainly by hustling for references, social media marketing (he has dozens of five-star reviews), and word of mouth.
“I would go to any place that had pellets. I had this whole spiel: ‘look, I’m factory trained, I can do this, I can do that. I’m not going to step on your toes, but if you have overflow or something you don’t service, I’ll take that on.’ Just anything to get my name out there as somebody doing this in the area. Because there aren’t a lot of people my age who do it. It’s a lot of older guys that are getting out of it.”
And that has created solid opportunity to grow. He works at Barnes on weekdays and devotes weekends to pellet stoves — during the busy winter season, he’s also servicing stoves after work during the week — and envisions a time, in the future, when the pellet stove operation becomes a full-time job, perhaps with a growing team of employees. But even then, he sees himself working in the field.
“I love doing the work, and I would always probably be a part of it, but there’s something comforting about having well-trained people to do the job while I do some of the logistics stuff. I think that would be ideal,” he told BusinessWest.
“My biggest thing is safety,” he added. “Anybody’s house I’m going into, I would hope that I would treat it like my own. I know that’s cliché to say, but it’s very true. And if I see something that somebody else did wrong, I’m going to tell the customer, and I’m going to do everything I can to fix it, to do it right. Because, at the end of the day, my name is on that.”
That commitment has been reflected by comments customers have left on town forums and online review sites, he said. And he’s become involved in the community in other ways, donating to local organizations both on his own and through volunteer efforts at Barnes.
Abelli’s footprint with the pellet stove business covers much of the southern part of the Pioneer Valley and into Connecticut, with Westfield being his busiest city.
He’s also encouraging young people to seek careers in the trades. Earlier this spring, he visited Putnam Vocational Technical Academy in Springfield and spoke with students in the HVAC department.
“I talked to them for about an hour and had a lot of good feedback,” he recalled. “I had kids come up to me at the end, saying, ‘I’d like to check that out.’ So that would be another pool to pick from if I needed a kid to help out.”
Like most trades these days, the career opportunities for young people are plentiful, he added. “Especially in this area, there’s enough work for everybody.”
Grace in the Journey
There’s certainly enough work for Abelli right now, and plenty of potential for growth ahead. He’s especially gratified with his current path having come off a lengthy, often painful health issue that has essentially resolved, and a long struggle for parenthood that culminated in an appropriately named child — because he and Jennifer feel like they’ve needed plenty of grace to get to this point.
“Sometimes you think it’s never going to end. That’s the hardest part. It’s the unknown,” he said of those struggles. “I always get a little emotional just talking about it. We’re not completely religious, but I feel like it was … something. Sometimes the timing just feels that way.”
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