Don’t worry I won’t do it myself. I’m interested in the process and approximate cost.
I currently have a vented gas log fireplace that is worthless if you are more than 3 feet away from it. I want to convert it into a real wood fireplace with an insert so it works as a heat source. What is involved and how much should the conversion cost?
Depends on your chimney. A house I use to own had a gas insert placed in what was a fireplace. The insert required propane and I wasn’t going to spend over $3000 to have propane tank put on my property. I remove the gas insert and put in a fireplace insert. It worked okay. My current house had a gas insert that was installed when the house was new, it did not work when I bought the house. I thought about a pellet stove insert instead, the cost would have be about $14,000. Over half of that was to build a new chimney from the ground up, it would be brick with a double insulated internal liner. I went with another gas insert instead for about $3500.
Didn’t we do this same subject in the past month? Your current chimney probably can’t handle a wood burning fireplace with an insert. What kind of chimney is there now? Is it a stove pipe chimney going up through the room or out through a wall? If that isn’t sufficient it can still be upgraded with a wider pipe and would cost much less than having a masonry chimney constructed.
It is certainly less expensive and less effort to install a wood stove than a new wood burning fireplace, especially if you are only going to put an insert in the fireplace anyway and not use it for open fires.
ETA: Here’s one of the recent threads. There are several more.
We moved into a house that with a standard fireplace that had been converted to gas about 15 years ago. We had a guy look at the fireplace to see if it was safe to convert back to a standard wood burner, but he said there was some problem with the chimney integrity or something, and suggested a wood-burning insert installed, which runs a pipe through the existing chimney. So that’s what we did. 15 years later, it still works great. Other than yearly cleanings, no maintenance issues.
I seem to remember it costing about $5000, but I think that included money we spent to have a guy add some nice stonework over the existing mantel brick. The insert itself, installed, was probably between 2 and 3 grand. In any case, I’ve said many times it’s the best $5000 I ever spent. It heats almost the entire house in the wintertime, and it’s nice and cozy sitting in front of the fire when it’s in the teens outside, like it is now.
Find a good supplier of firewood, and make sure you only burn well-seasoned hardwood-- pine creates high levels of creosote buildup in the chimney pipe that can be dangerous. I said in one of those other recent threads TriPolar mentioned that I did the math once on the cost of burning purchased firewood vs. gas heat, and firewood came out a little cheaper, not much. However, I’ve been able to collect wood from Craigslist ads for free wood, or fallen trees on our property; although cutting, splitting and stacking is a lot of work, there’s nothing like the feeling of burning firewood you collected yourself and saying “ahh, free heat!”.