It is kind of hard to advise you without more information. I assume that since you had a propane furnace in the old mobile home, that you do not have access to piped in natural gas. But you probably have an already in place propane tank that you could use in the new mobile home. Also you didn't give information about how much time you have to deal with a wood burner. Wood stoves or furnaces take a bunch of time to deal with getting, splitting and storing wood, feeding the fire, cleaning ashes out and doing general maintenance on the unit. My experience with using gas heat is that it doesn't take much time at all to keep it working perfectly.
Something else to consider is your insurance rates. When we had a mobile home, I installed a special certified mobile home wood stove after sometimes paying $300+ a month to heat the mobile home with the electric furnace. I got a permit, did the installation perfectly and passed both the inspections. Yet when my insurance company learned I had a wood stove (I told them), they more than doubled my insurance rates. And after a few years, that company decided that they would no longer insure ANY mobile homes that had wood stoves, and canceled our policy. I finally found another company that would insure us, but they charged about $1000/year to insure the mobile home and contents for about $25K value. Suddenly the economy of burning wood was much less inviting than it had been.
Eventually we built a new home, and since a natural gas line was installed on our road, we got set up to use gas for heating the house, heating water and also a gas dryer. Although the price of natural gas has risen a bunch in the time since we hooked up, I believe we spend less for heat now in a fairly large house than we used to in the much smaller mobile home. Our insurance is lots less expensive for many times the maximum payout if it should ever be completely destroyed. The gas is convenient, relatively inexpensive and so far has been completely reliable. It is also extremely clean, which is very different than what we experienced from the wood stove in the living room of our mobile home. While I really enjoyed the radiant heat from the wood stove, I suspect that gas heating is more healthy. My wife has developed asthma and probably could not stand to be in a house heated with wood now.
Propane costs more for a given amount of heat than the same amount of heat from natural gas. Propane also either has to be delivered or hauled in small containers rather than just coming from a gas line in the ground.
But unless you have lots of time to deal with messing with wood all the time and have a free or nearly free source of usable firewood, I bet that converting to a propane furnace would be your best move.
We have some problems with power outages, sometimes lasting for days. The wood stove in the mobile home kept us warm and OK during those times and we even cooked meals on it. Now with the natural gas system we have I have added a generator to run the furnace, well pump, freezers and refrigerator. A fairly small 6500 watt generator set does the job to keep us going. It would take a huge generator to run electric resistance heating!
Most fireplaces are not very efficient at producing room heat. They can be nice to look at and seeing the flames and coals is enjoyable, but without strongly sealing glass doors, I think a fireplace actually sucks more warm air out of a house than it produces. They are also messy and most smoke, at least some of the time. If I had a mobile home with a fireplace, I would strongly consider removing the fireplace and either replacing it with a mobile home wood stove, or with a gas stove that requires no electricity to work in a power outage.
Heat pumps are neat--A/C in the Summer and heat the rest of the year. Most of the older designs are not very efficient at making heat if the air temperature is much below freezing. But I have read that some newer types work better at colder air temperatures. The other alternative is the geothermal type, which is extremely efficient. But the installation of ground loops is costly--my neighbor installed about a MILE of loops buried 6 feet down, and can be a real hassle in stony ground. Another alternative would be to pump well water, extract some heat from the water, and reinject the cooler water into another well. But that would take a bunch more electricity than the ground loop type system.
If you are like most of us, money is fairly tight, especially right after buying the new mobile home. I think I would consider replacing the electric furnace now with a propane furnace, or maybe just see how bad the electric bills are through this Winter. They might not be as bad as you fear...hopefully. Then when the weather is better, you could possibly set up a heat pump of some kind or some other alternative system. You probably will not need air conditioning for a while! Good luck!
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