Should I keep the gas fireplace or install a wood burning stove?

In My Humble Opinion
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I recently purchased a house. The house has a gas fireplace which generates enough heat for the size of the living room.
I am thinking about having it converted to a wood burning stove.
I like a wood burning stove for the following reasons.

  • Aesthetics - I like the look of the logs aflame, etc.
  • I can directly see the rate of consumption of fuel. Whenever the gas burns, it feels like a surprise will be waiting at the end of the month.
  • It provides a natural timer for how long I want to chill out in the living room. Stick some wood in, light it up, chill out until the fire dies down.

On the other hand

  • Gas fireplace is much easier to use. No ash, just turn it then turn it off. Tbh, this doesn’t seem to be a huge issue for me.

Looking for any thoughts/opinions on the topic.

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Opinion only, since I’ve never had a gas fireplace. I’d use the gas for a couple of months to see what the consumption/cost is. I assume you have a feeling for how much wood you’d burn. Is it free wood or do you have to buy a cord or 2?

Anyway, at that point, you’d have some data for comparison. FWIW, we have a pellet insert in our upstairs fireplace and a wood-burning insert in the basement fireplace. I much prefer the pellet insert and wish we’d put one downstairs also. We have the space to store several tons of pellets, and I know that would be a consideration for some, but it’s another option.

Assuming costs are comparable, I’d probably stick with gas for the simplicity. I think. My MIL was badly burned when a gas stove malfunctioned, tho it was 60+ years ago, so I’m hoping the technology is safer today.

My 2¢.

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What do you like about the pellet insert?

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Note that there is a big difference between a wood burning stove and a traditional wood fireplace.

The latter is useless for heat. It sucks air from the house and sends it up the chimney. So all of the room air that you paid to heat with your furnace goes up the chimney. Wood fireplaces are actually a net negative so far as heating your house is concerned. They are also a mess to use. I’m a former Boy Scout, and I know how to light a fire, but you still end up with ashes and soot everywhere. Our last house had a wood fireplace, and I think we used it twice in three years.

That’s why when we built our current house I put in a gas fireplace with a heat exchanger and a blower. There is a glass window so you don’t lose room air, and with the blower it puts a lot of heat into the room.

A free-standing wood stove (as opposed to wood fireplace) also works as a heat source, but it takes up a lot more room, and you still have to deal with ashes and soot (though using wood pellets reportedly helps minimize this). I’ve never owned one of these, though.

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You left out the cost of wood which, unless you have a source of free wood, is getting pretty expensive. Then chopping it, stacking it. Going outside in cold & snow to retrieve it. And the mess.
I have a gas stove that pretty much heats the house. I’ve had wood fireplaces in the past. Watching the embers and hearing the cackle grew old pretty quick for the above reasons. I’ll take gas any day. I also have a gas furnace. I keep the thermostat set pretty low on that because I only use it to maintain a non freezing level. I kind of wish the gas stove had a thermostat so it would be controlled during times when I’m not available to turn it on & off. It can become too hot within a pretty short time period. I wouldn’t recommend them for small enclosed rooms.

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Easy to use, relatively easy to clean, heats our common areas very well, thereby saving the cost of using our oil furnace. We buy the pellets early when they’re on sale, saving a few bucks that way, too.

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I hadn’t considered a pellet stove before. Adding it to my list now.

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Depending on where you live, the could be a movement to ban wood burning stoves and fireplaces. Where I live in the Seattle Tacoma area, pollution levels shoot through the roof when we get our colder winter weather. After 3 or 4 days of clear cold weather, the sky is gray and smell of smoke hangs in the air. We already get enough of that now due to wildfires, even those in Russia.

I have a gas fireplace and it’s not our main source of heat. Using it adds only a few dollars to our monthly bill. I also recently added gas lines for my generator and gas grill. The guy that installed the lines said the cost of gas is about 1/10th the cost of propane so I should save some money when grilling this summer.

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You can have a combination fireplace that burns both wood and gas. The chimney has to be adequate for wood burning, and that might be a limitation for you to burn wood at all.

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A common theme I am picking up suggests I might have an overly romantic idea about burning wood. Tbh, I don’t have a lot of experience in this area.
The pellet idea seems like a middle ground. Whatever we use, it won’t be a primary source of heat in the winter.
The house has a brick chimney. Not sure if it was ever used for wood in the past or if the brick chimney is just a cosmetic wrapper around the gas exhaust (flue?).
I live nearish to Gatwick airport in England. I checked the local rules and wood burning is allowed.

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Over here there’s been a hooha over whether wood burners deliver high levels of particulates. I have no particular axe to grind, but I thought it might be of interest.

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There’s nothing wrong with that.

When we moved into our current house (about 25 years ago) one of the prior owners had put a gas insert into the fireplace, which had originally been built as a regular wood burning fireplace. I hate gas fireplaces. My wife thought it was great, with no ash to clean up. I thought it was lame. I ripped it out, patched the hole where the gas line had been run in, and restored it back to the wood burning fireplace that it had been originally. Mrs. Geek hates cleaning up ash, so she doesn’t. It doesn’t bother me, so I’m the one that cleans up afterwards. To me it’s not that big of a deal and we don’t get ash all over the place, so I don’t really understand those that say the ash is horribly messy. I get that it bothers some people, but to me it’s no biggie.

We don’t really use it to heat the house, but it will get the house nice and toasty if you put enough wood in it. I will admit that a lot of heat does go up the chimney, but if you get a good fire going in our fireplace it definitely ends up generating more heat inside than it carries up and out through the chimney. Note that your fireplace has to be rated for that much heat before you try something like this. Another house I lived in previously had a fireplace that was only good for burning those small cheap imitation firelogs.

A wood stove will definitely keep more heat inside the house than most fireplaces.

The romance of burning wood is quite honestly one of the main appeals of our fireplace. We had all of the Geeklings plus some friends over on Christmas day, and had a fire going all evening. It kept the house plenty warm and provided a nice atmosphere for the holiday.

If you like the idea of chilling out in front of a wood stove, go for it.

I prefer a fireplace to a wood stove, though there are some wood stoves that I would definitely like. Personal taste, I guess. If I had to choose a wood stove, I would definitely prefer an old fashioned wood burner over a pellet stove. The aesthetics of a true wood burner are definitely part of the appeal for me.

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Is it getting the house nice and toasty, or just the room where the fireplace is? Because everything I’ve read indicates you generally lose more heat than is generated by the fireplace, causing the furnace to kick on to maintain the temperature in the rest of the house.

HEAT LOSS IS COLD REALITY OF A WOOD-BURNING FIREPLACE

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P.S. I should add that a wood fireplace might still be worth it to a homeowner for the aesthetics on special occasions, but people should be aware of the potential downsides of a wood fireplace if they are trying to use it for heat on a regular basis.

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Also, natural gas produces much less CO2 per btu of heat generated. Burning wood is a pretty dirty way of generating heat, even if that heat didn’t all go up the chimney.

A wood burning fireplace will generally be able to heat the room its in through radiant heat, at the expense of all the other rooms which must then replace their heat loss from warm air being pulled through the chimney with extra furnace heat.

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To both of these points, it bears mentioning that gas units nowadays are often sold with timers that shut off the gas after a few minutes or hours.

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Agree with the pellets. We have a pellet insert. The house had a fireplace sometime in the past. Previous owners closed it and put in a wood stove. We took out the wood stove after a few years and put in a pellet fireplace insert. House insurance company was relieved. Pellet inserts don’t classify as wood burners like the stove does. We burn through about 4 ton of pellets per year. Our stove runs September through April plus soggy summer days to chase the chill. Our insert has the glass door so we get the flames and looks like wood once it smudges up.
It can be modified to use an external air supply for the combustion chamber but we didn’t. Our neighbors have a full sized pellet stove with an external air supply. They heat most of their 2800 sq ft house with it. We keep most of our downstairs comfortable so the furnace just maintains the bedrooms at the lower settings.

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I set my profile picture to show what I have now. Not sure if this is considered a decent gas fireplace or not.

Couldn’t figure out how to post a picture to the thread, is it allowed?

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Owner of a wood-burning stove here. The Ded residence has hot water underfloor heating, with a gas boiler. That keeps the house (which is very well insulated anyway, after the renovation) comfortably warm, and the stove is a tad oversized for the room, but it adds some extra warmth on colder days. Essentially, it is far more cheerful to be able to see leaping flames. Oh, and the cats like it ,too, they like to lie in front of it.

Some asked if gas fires are safer these days. Gas stoves at least have a flow cutout device if they are turned on but there is no flame. Gas fires probably have the same by now, given that I have not bought on for three decades. The good points are that they are easy to use.

Pellets? I have only heard of them being used for boilers, not in fireplace stoves. They cost more than firewood, and you need a lot of storage space. Otherwise, I have no experience with them.

Cost? YMMV. It depends on the cost of firewood and gas in your area. Wood is cheap where I live, gas is is somewhere in the middle, and electricity is very expensive. The stove also gets the bigger bits after various trees are pruned.

Pollution? A good modern wood stove fired with dry wood produces very little pollution or smoke. Avoid using resinous wood such as pine, as it will produce a lot of smoke and soot. If I find pine in a batch of new logs I just thrown into another pile and burn them up in the barbecue or in the burn bin to get rid of garden rubbish. My (British) stove is exceptionally clean and does not even have a catalyst. Dunno if they ship to the USA, but I was not on their regular shipping routes either.

Hard work? Firewood warms you twice over, the first time being when you split it. But you get a free workout. It takes a while, too, it took me two weeks of intermittent work to split a truckload of wood - and it was a small truck. You have to stack and dry the wood, and carry it to the stove, light the fire and clear out the ashes. It’s not really a big deal as far as I am concerned, but YMMV.

So; a wood fire is more fun but more work. I took a vote on it - and got outvoted by the cats, so a wood stove it is.

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[Album] imgur.com

Here’s our wood burning fireplace. Place a link for your picture with the link on its own line.

When I first moved in with my gf I loved the idea of a fire in the evening. We have a woodshed and trees fall often enough for many fires.

The last time I lit a fire was probably three years ago during a power failure. The power came back before the fire was really going strong.