We have a wood stove in our living room. Our house is admittedly small, but it generates more than enough heat to heat the whole house, upstairs and down.
In fact, over-zealous adding of logs can lead to the house getting too warm.
We have a big ceiling fan in the living room that’s great for moving the air and helping the house to heat a bit more evenly.
Folks have mentioned most of the important things to consider. I’ll add another: you can’t just turn it off. If you realize that you’ve accidentally overheated the house, and it’s 78 degrees, but there’s still a log or two burning, you can tamp it down a bit, but the heat’s going to keep coming until the wood is gone.
Didn’t mention, but our pellet stove has a thermostat and a pellet feed adjustment, so it’s not necessarily going full blast all the time. I just now took this:
The fan is humming along, blowing warm air into the room. It keeps our non-bedroom areas around 70° or so. The furnace thermostat is in the hallway outside the bedrooms at the other end of the house. It’s set at 65° - on really cold nights, it’ll kick on a couple of times, but almost never during the day. I think I dump ash every 400-500# of pellets (10-12 bags, roughly a 40# bag a day on coldest days.)
Hello neighbour. I’m assuming that, like us, the gas fire or woodburner is not the main heating, and is there for daytime use on cold days (boiler/furnace timed for morning and evening) and for cool evenings in spring and autumn?
We had a gas fire taken out and a woodburner put in. Because of fireplace space limitations (about the same amount of space that you have) it’s a smallish burner, with the heat output of about two or two-and-a half medium sized radiators. In a decent sized living room you’ll have to open the door a crack after it gets properly going.
On the plus side:
They are pretty efficient, much more so than an open fire (figures vary but you see things like 80% efficient vs 25% - whatever that means).
They are comforting and fun - you will feel much warmer with a log fire even if you actually are not.
If you can forage wood (I do) then it’s free heat.
On a cold day it keeps one room toasty and takes the chill off the house.
It’s off-grid. The perfect emergency heater.
Prepping logs - cutting, splitting - is, as noted upthread, a workout. That’s a feature, not a bug. (but you do need somewhere to do it).
It is said (source: Mrs Trep) that it adds to the value of the house.
You know those annoying clothing bags from pseudo-charities that get stuffed through your letter box? Line a bucket with them, they’re perfect for ash disposal.
On the minus side:
Bought logs are not cheap.
If you forage, you have to have space to dry logs - we probably have a ton on site, including storage of dried logs.
If you have a smallish burner, the glass will fog bad enough that you have to clean it pretty much every use.
It ain’t cheap to buy and install. I reckon payback for us was about 10 years (but we had to have the fireplace enlarged, the flue lined etc)
Sooner or later regs will make it more and more difficult to run a log burner.
That said, back in the days before COVID, on a shitty winter day when we had friends over, we would fire up the log burner and settle back with a whisky… what price joy?
If I were you I would look into a pellet stove or pellet fireplace insert. I have a stand alone pellet stove and I love it.
Pellet stoves are all about using air flow to extract the most heat out of the wood. You will not see any smoke coming out of the chimney at all. The installer drilled a hole in my floor for the incoming air so it doesn’t suck the air out of your room, it comes from outside. It is piped into the chimney like a traditional wood burning stove, but most of the heat is extracted before it goes up the chimney. I can almost grab the stove pipe going into the chimney with my hand.
It has a glass door so you can watch the fire burning if that is what you like. My old cat used to love sitting in my lap and watching the stove.
There are several types of stoves and inserts so I think you owe it to yourself to at least look at them.
I buy a ton, 50-40pound bags for about $240 and one bag lasts about one day. Just fill up the hopper and forget it, check it maybe twice a day to see if it needs refill. No buying wood, stacking, splitting, no bark dust, no mess, just pour in a bag. And unlike a traditional wood burning stove, if the house gets too hot you don’t need to open the windows to cool down, just turn it off or down. If you turn it off it cools right down in about 20 minutes. They can also be regulated with a thermostat. You get the feel of wood without a lot of the bad of dealing with, finding, splitting, stacking, wood, and cleaning up all that stuff… The actual burn box, where the fire is happening, is only about 2 inches by 5 inches. The pellets get the complete shit burned out of them due to the fans pulling in new air, and there is very little ash to deal with. I dump the ash collector box about twice a winter.
You do need to do some cleaning to keep them running efficiently. About once a week open it up and brush down a few areas, about 2 minutes. Once or twice a year a more thorough cleaning. Because like I said, it is all about air flow and extracting all the possible heat from the pellets.
And mine is 20 years old, I’m sure the technology is much better now. We installed it because there is not yet natural gas available on our road and I just did not want to spend my time dealing with all the downsides of actual wood.
There is also the option of keeping your gas fireplace and installing a pellet stove in another area. They don’t really need a chimney, because most of the heat is extracted before it goes out the exhaust pipe.
The exhaust pipe can just be routed out the side of a wall without needing the heat protection of a chimney.
I have a gas fireplace in the bar, and a wood stove in the sunroom. The main source of heat is HWBB. I like them both, but really do enjoy the wood stove. I like the whole process, I like tending the fire, I like splitting the wood. Here, around Boston, I can get a cord of seasoned wood delivered (OK, dumped in the driveway) for about $300. As a supplemental heat source, that should be plenty for a year.
Modern stoves have really good options for adjusting the heat flow (if I turn mine all the way down it will basically go out) and they burn very cleanly.
Also, and I know this is anecdotal, but some of my friends are forever complaining about their pellet stoves breaking, and my gas fireplace has needed two service calls in two years.
Finally, if you are someplace with frequent power outages, the wood stove is nice in that it will always work.
When we moved in we had an ordinary fireplace that had been converted to gas. I always wanted a real wood-burning fireplace and someone recommended a high-efficiency fireplace insert, which is like a wood-burning stove inside the fireplace, like the pic @kayaker and some others posted. So that’s what we got.
I personally love it. It heats almost the entire house and it makes winters much more tolerable. Yes, it’s a little messy, yes it requires either buying or finding, chopping and splitting lots of wood, so it’s work but I don’t mind. In the winter I usually have a fire going every weekend, all weekend long.
And to add, since I missed the edit window, I did the math once on the cost breakdown between running the furnace or having the fire insert heat the house at the going rate of cordwood, and it was a little, but not much cheaper to burn wood. But there are seasons I managed to scrounge up free firewood on Craigslist or cut up a tree that died on our property, and there’s no better feeling than sitting in front of a warm fire saying “ah, free heat”.
My parents had a wood stove in their house in the late 1970s, early 1980s. One disadvantage was that it made the air very dry, so my mother constantly kept a pot of water on top to humidify the air. I spent a lot of time chopping wood for it. (Once I missed the log with the axe and it went right through my sneaker, so I pulled off the shoe and sock right there to check my foot. Fortunately, the shoe was the only thing injured.) Their acre-size lot was only about a quarter wooded so we had to buy firewood. That’s how I learned about the unit of measure called a cord. (I read someplace at the time that if you wanted to heat a house purely by firewood, you would need something like twenty acres of forest for it to be sustainable.)
I have a wood burning fire place. It’s ornamental. While it heats the living room, it absolutely pulls heat from the house. I use it about one a year, on Christmas morning, and i really enjoy it. But there’s no way i would recommend something that isn’t advertised as a heating device to try to heat the house.
I don’t end up with ashes and soot everywhere. Why would you? I really don’t understand.
As far as heating goes, we have a wood fireplace, and we have used it as an emergency heat source when the furnace was out. With an ordinary fire, it just heats the living room, and might result in a net loss by making other rooms cooler. But a really big hot fire does heat the house. No other way it got warm while our furnace pilot light was out.
As long as it’s not meant to be a regular source of heat, I’d say go with the one you like best.
Many years ago, I lived with wood as my main heat source. I had the time and energy to go out and cut at least part of our annual supply myself, and I really liked having a personal relationship with my heating fuel. Our current home came with a gas fireplace, and I am very surprised how much I’ve come to like it. A similarly pleasant type of heat, without the need for my aging body to cut/spit/haul/stack the wood. Extra bonus, we’re in a valley where winter air quality is a real concern; burning gas doesn’t generate the particulates that wood does.
I missed that. I don’t get ashes and soot outside the fireplace either. And I’m not sure how you would. But i definitely remove heat from the house when i use it. It pulls warm air up the chimney.
Didn’t read all the responses, so forgive me if this has been covered.
If the main thermostat for your heating system is located in the room where the fireplace is, this can tend to exacerbate the ‘every other room in the house is now freezing’ effect. The fireplace will warm the thermostat, obviating the ‘call for heat.’
[Just thinking about it: A wood-fueled fireplace – as has been mentioned – may give you a rather opposite problem if it’s sucking warm air out of other parts of the house and leaving the thermostat colder than it would otherwise be. This is really dependent on the location of the t’stat. The ‘call for heat’ may be artificially high/more than otherwise needed. You could have hot bedrooms, or just a higher heating bill.]
In our last house, the gas FP was a real delight, but we had a zoned heating system where the bedrooms had a separate t’stat and stayed at the exact temp we wished.
It’s a not-quite-minor factor that many don’t consider with a fireplace.
Which is all … well … only tangentially related to your OP
Been using wood stoves for about fifty years now, sometimes as main heat source and sometimes as secondary; and before that grew up in a house with fireplaces that had originally been main heat sources, though they were mostly recreational by the time you get to my lifetime. The house I’m in now is probably about 50/50 – central heating furnace runs on cold nights, maybe some in below-zero F weather, keeps the house from freezing if I can’t be home; and also provides heat when it’s cold enough to need some but the weather’s over about 40ºF, because the wood stove will make it too hot in the house in intermediate weather.
Before using any chimney, get it inspected by someone who knows what they’re doing, and cleaned if it needs it. A cracked chimney (may not be obvious) can burn the house down. A clogged one will fill your house up with smoke, and one full of old creosote may catch fire hot enough to crack itself.
If it’s to be used for woodburning, it should have a liner; it might have a ceramic liner or a metal one. If it doesn’t have a liner, you can get a metal one put in. Beware, however, of chimney cleaners who try to sell you liners you don’t need – I had one such try to tell me that my perfectly good ceramic liner, which will probably outlive me, needed to be replaced by the metal ones his company was selling. Did not hire again.
Some woodburning stoves are a lot more efficient than others. More efficient stoves give you cleaner air as well as more heat.
Some fireplaces are better designed than others to get heat into the house. Bear in mind that that’s how people used to stay alive in the winter – if they were all net heat drains that wouldn’t have worked at all. But most modern fireplaces are crap built only for looks and a lot of them probably are net heat drains. They can often be drastically improved by putting stove inserts in them.
I gather that you’d be buying your wood, not cutting it from your own woodlot? Check comparison prices in your area of firewood, pellets, and gas. Make sure you understand the terminology of the people selling the wood – a face cord and a full cord are two very different things; and ask how long the wood has seasoned after it was split, and what species of wood. Most wood is nearly useless when green and some species are nearly useless even when dry. Also ask if the wood’s already split and if the price includes delivery and/or stacking.
Whichever you get, I’d recommend getting something that works if the power’s off. A cooking surface is nice, too.
That’s why you stand with your feet apart and the axe aimed so if it misses it hits the ground between them.
Depends on where you are – climate affects tree growth. Here it’s more like five, if the woodlot’s well maintained.
What soot there is – and it shouldn’t be much, if you’re burning the stove at all right so your chimney doesn’t clog up too fast and you’re not fouling the air – should be in the chimney. Ashes should stay in the stove, though you might spill a few when cleaning out the excess.
Bits and pieces of bark and so on that come off the woodpile, though –
(Careful with those ashes, by the way – don’t assume they’re cold unless the stove’s been out for weeks. I know at least one house that burned down because somebody put ashes they thought were cold out on the porch in a cardboard box. Empty into a metal can, and be careful where you put it.)
That’s true. Another factor may be how and where you spend your time. If I get cold, I go sit by the wood stove. I can get just as hot as I please and not have to heat the whole house to do it.
Depending on how old you are, maybe I was about 21 and learning that myself; thank goodness, by being told by whoever was teaching me how to split wood, rather than by putting an axe through my foot or even my shoe. – I just realized that I don’t remember who that was. I do remember them being very clear that how you stood was important and why, though.
This is usually true, although a fireplace insert can mitigate the losses. Nonetheless, a fireplace does heat the immediate area it’s in, and was once a common form of heating.
The virtues of a wood fireplace are very much a matter of preference. I’ve always loved them, and used them frequently. Hauling home a cord of wood (when I had the right vehicle for it) or getting it delivered was one of the rituals of autumn.
I realize the OP has a gas fireplace not a wood-burning one, but I would personally opt to keep the gas fireplace as a compromise. It gives you at least a little of the same ambience while eliminating all the hassles.
But wood is part of the active carbon cycle so is really carbon-neutral, whereas natural gas is a fossil fuel that releases net new carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago.
We had a woodstove installed in this not quite 1000sqft house, when we bought it. In our living room, 9+1/2 ft ceiling but there’s a fan! As the bedroom is the only ‘upstairs’ to this place, it’s quite a good set up for sleeping. There are parts of the house less served by the heat of it, like my kitchen. I just crank the furnace for a few minutes and it warms up all the cooler spaces.
Throughout this lockdown we’ve had a fire most every day, for most of the day and night. It’s certainly not all sooty and dirty everywhere. We are both over 65 and order dried, split, hardwood by the cord, dropped into our drive.
I enjoy everything about it, to be honest. I wake very early, put the kettle on and start a fire. There’s something primal at work, like making bread. It is creative, ritualistic, and enormously rewarding. Watching it spring to life, the smell, the warmth. As an opening act for any day, I highly recommend it.
Knowing you have an alternate heat source, and can cook, should the need arise is just a bonus really. Especially if it get very cold and snowy outside.
