A fireplace is a welcome addition to any home. It provides a focal piece, a sense of style and a beautiful, glowing warmth in the winter. Warmth, that is, unless you have a traditional, open-hearth fireplace. These fireplaces can actually be a drain on your home, allowing cold drafts to blow down the chimney and as much as 8 percent of your home’s heated air to flow out up and out of the chimney on cold days. Fortunately, there’s a compromise between the beauty of a traditional wood-burning fireplace and the desire to efficiently heat your home: A wood-burning fireplace insert. In fact, installing an efficient wood-burning fireplace insert in your existing open-hearth fireplace can reduce your home’s heating bills by 40 percent. Here’s how.
Sealing the gap
One of the most basic ways a wood-burning fireplace insert lowers your energy bills is by sealing the gap of your fireplace. An open-hearth fireplace creates a giant hole in your home. Even with a damper, warm air from your home fills the fireplace and flows up the chimney. An open-hearth fireplace is comparably to having an open window in your home in the coldest temperatures. A fireplace insert seals the gap of your fireplace. With an insert, the heating system is entirely closed, and the door seals tightly, making it impossible for the air from your home to enter the fireplace and leave through the chimney.
Heat-generating technology
Wood-burning fireplace inserts are high-tech heating equipment. Over the last 25 years, manufacturer’s have put a lot of time into researching ways to make wood-burning inserts, fireplaces and stoves burn more efficiently and generate more heat. Some models include catalytic converters to increase the intensity of the fire and the heat output of the fireplace. The units also contain a series of blowers to ensure that the heat that’s generated from the fire is pumped back into your living space.
Radiation
One of the simplest ways a wood-burning insert can increase the heat output of your fireplace is the concept of radiation. The glass doors of a wood-burning fireplace are made to absorb as much of the heat from the fireplace as possible. That glass then radiates the heat out to the nearby air, helping your home to capture even more of the cozy warmth of your wood-burning insert.
If you’re ready to transform your open-hearth fireplace from an energy drain to an energy generator, stop by the Cozy Flame, the retail branch of Total Chimney Care! Our fireplace experts can help you pick out the perfect wood-burning fireplace insert for your home, which can then be installed by one of Total Chimney Care’s trained and certified fireplace technicians. Total Chimney Care can have you enjoying more warmth — and lower energy bills — this winter.