Tell me about your experiences with home fireplaces

In My Humble Opinion
21

We have a fireplace. Like the OP, it’s more for fun than heat. We definitely do not use it every day, but we use it a lot more than two or three times per year.

My wife is in the same camp as all of those in this thread who say that the charm wears off quickly. I’m not. I love it. It doesn’t seem like a chore to me, though I can understand why cutting/splitting wood and cleaning out ash would feel like a chore to many. As long as I take care of the ashes and build and maintain the fire, my wife does like it. She enjoys the fires, she just doesn’t like doing any of the work involved.

My firewood comes from trees I have cut down. Usually by the time I start running low on firewood one of my friends needs a tree taken down. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and haven’t had to pay for firewood yet. Buying firewood is certainly an option though. You can store it under a tarp, just make sure not to store your wood in a place where water collects or along a path of rain runoff.

Make sure that your fireplace can handle a hot fire. I lived in one house where if you really got a hot fire going, the wall in the room behind it would start to get too hot. You could only burn small fires or artificial fire logs in that one. A relative of ours has the same issue with his fireplace. My fireplace can handle as hot of a fire as you are willing to stand.

If you use your fireplace a lot, you’ll need to get the chimney cleaned every year. For just occasional use, you can probably go every two or three years with cleaning. What type of wood you burn makes a difference. Cheap pine in particular will leave a lot more creosote in your chimney than woods like maple or oak.

Definitely make sure you get your chimney cleaned regularly though. Chimney fires are no joke.

As mentioned already, if your fireplace doesn’t have doors, get doors. We also have a chain screen in ours, which is nice.

You will need a good set of fireplace tools. You need a poker, tongs, and a shovel. Most sets come with a brush as well, which is nice. Don’t skimp and get cheapie tools. You are also going to want a metal bucket for the ash. We use a fairly small bucket, but we empty it out between every fire.

You are going to need a grate to hold the wood. Don’t just sit the wood on the floor of the fireplace. You probably know that already but I don’t know your experience with fires.

Having something to hold the wood is a good idea too. We have a small log holder next to the fireplace. In the winter we will also bring wood from our wood pile into the breezeway next to the garage so that any frost or snow on the wood will melt off and the wood will be nice and dry. So the wood goes wood pile -> breezeway -> log holder by fireplace -> into the fire. Even under a tarp you can get some snow and ice buildup on your wood. The wood in our wood pile is also not split, so I split it once it is in the breezeway.

I have a lot of experience starting fires with just twigs and small branches, but you can also use fire starter sticks if you want to be quick and lazy about it. I know someone who uses artificial fire logs as a fire starter, but that’s really lazy IMHO.

I know it’s been said but it’s worth repeating. NO PAPER IN THE FIREPLACE unless you really want to burn your house down.

Make sure the wood is nicely seasoned (had a lot of time to dry out) before burning it. If you are buying firewood, it will probably already be fairly well seasoned. You don’t want to burn green wood. It does not burn well.

When the fire burns down low, we will close the doors and go to bed. Never leave the doors open and the fire unattended.

I’m also firmly in the camp that believes gas and electric fireplaces suck. Stick to real wood.

22

Loads of great advice here from fireplace owners. Ignore the doubters, they’ve forgotten how to have fun.

I’ve had an open fireplace in the past, but found it worked better for aesthetics than heat, as the heat just vanished up the chimney. I now have a woodburner, which is much more efficient.

The only two bits of advice I’ll offer above what you already have:

  1. Get the fireplace swept once a year, for both efficiency and safety reasons. This is non-negotiable.
  2. Store logs in a logstore - these very cheap shed-like constructions will keep your logs in ideal conditions outside - lifting them off the floor to prevent rot, and keeping the worst of the wet weather off. Logs need to breathe.
23

You’re contradicting yourself in the second paragraph. Those firestarter logs can coat the inside of your chimney with crap the same way that burning a pine log will. Burn only hardwood.

Get metal doors in front of the metal screen. Closing them both reduces the airflow which will help to kill a fire faster but also makes it safer if you want to go to bed as embers can’t get thru the glass.
Finally, don’t store the wood outside up against the house. If you have/get any termites in the wood (very possible given the source, ie. delivered) you don’t want them as your immediate neighbor. Store the wood away from the side of your house, at least 5’ away. If you’re planning on having a fire in crappy weather, by all means bring some logs onto the porch but return any unused ones afterwards.

24

My last 2 houses over 30 yrs have had fireplaces. We NEVER have fires in the current one. The main reason is that it cools off the rest of the house. At times we burn candles in it Not the same, but a nice vibe nevertheless.

When we moved into this house, there were swifts in our chimney. Put a screen on top of your chimney.

25

We have a traditional fireplace in the living room. Over the last 20 years we’ve used it… once. I’m just not into it.

26

This. Our house has two fireplaces, and I don’t remember the last time we used either of them.

27

A fireplace, as inefficient as it is, can be a good and fun source of heat in early and late season. When the air outside is still not that cold (as that is the air that is going to replace the air from used in the fireplace and thrown out the stack. It’d say anything over 40F This way you can warm the fireplace room very nicely without much of penalty for the rest of the house. In the really cold temperatures, it’s often better to keep it unused and shut.

28

Fun and smelly. Almost only used when we had guests. I had one in my bedroom but I only used that one a few times because of the effort and cleanup involved. You’ll need a screen to stop sputtering sparks hitting the floor or carpet when you aren’t watching. A net positive for entertainment but not for utility of living. In my early 50’s would I want one now? Not really, just an outdoors fire pit would be better.

29

If the fireplace and chimney are built on the outside of the house you won’t get much heat from them. But if you live in VA you won’t need much. It’s fun to sit in front of the fire on a cold winter evening anyway.

30

We use our fireplace maybe once a winter. We really enjoy that one time, though.

31

This is the one we have in our bedroom.
As I said upthread, we use it almost daily. It puts out a lot of heat, as the metal heats up and radiates.
The “Fire Orb”

ETA: Warning, video. I recommend skip intro.

32

I think fireplaces are a bit like pets - you’re either a ‘fireplace person’ or you’re not. All my contractors and my insurer recommended getting a natural gas insert for our wood-burning fireplace, but we kept it and we love it.

A proper old wood fireplace probably sucks more heat out of your house than it puts it, but I feel it’s worth it for the ambiance and coziness, YMMV.

We’ve got a firewood guy who supplies us with clean, dry, split wood and cleaning out the ash is a biweekly chore that’s done in minutes.

33

Unless you have a lot of experience building fires, your first few fires might not be the greatest. Don’t build your first fire when it’s an important event, like a romantic evening or whatever. Do a few fires just to get the hang of it.

One thing that newbies don’t always realize is that a single piece of wood doesn’t burn very well. You want several pieces of wood burning in close proximity. The heat coming off each piece helps ignite the other pieces. Some of the early fires you make will be figuring out how to place the wood to optimize the shared heating. You should have a minimum of 3 large pieces when you start a fire. After the fire has burned for a while you can add one piece at a time to extend the fire as long as you wish.

It can take a surprisingly long time for the wood to catch on fire. Newbies may put a few sheets of paper under the wood which flares up quick and hot, but it doesn’t get the logs hot enough to catch fire. Once the paper is gone, the fire is as well. It’s better to start a fire with smaller pieces of wood which catch fire easily and burn for several minutes. Keep adding the small pieces if necessary to catch the logs on fire.

If you cut your own wood, you’ll need to split the logs. Anything bigger than a few inches around will be harder to burn. A great tool to split logs is a splitting maul, which is like a sledgehammer with a wedge on one end. Swinging it down on top of a log will easily split it apart. [standard disclaimer about being careful]

34

We have a fire place. We use it every year on Christmas morning. We sometimes use it ones other time. I enjoy it.

We have a giant copper kettle in the living room, in which we keep a few logs. It was a present. But it’s nice to have a safe way to hold wood that might have rot or insects.

Advice: make sure the flu is open before your start, or the house will fill with smoke. Make sure to close the flu when your are done, or your heating bill will be high. I often start by shoving one crumpled piece of paper into the flu and lighting that, to get the stack of air in the chimney drawing up. I do that after making the fire, and before lighting the fire.

Making the fire: a single log doesn’t burn well, but two next to each other can be okay. I usually use three. Two on the grate, and one rested parallel and on top of the other two. I put some tinder underneath and light that. (One of those wooden boxes that clementines comes in, containing one or two sheets of crumpled newspaper, works great.)

Embers can stay hot for a long time in the ashes, but if you have a door, it even a good metal mesh curtain, they aren’t going anywhere, and aren’t especially dangerous. I only light fires in the winter, and only clean out ashes in the summer. The insulation of ashes makes it easier to keep a fire going, I think, so I never remove all the ashes. I guess if I had more fires if need to worry about cleaning them out. But hey, I only remove ashes from my charcoal grill every fourth or fifth time I use it.

(When I was a kid we rented a ski house with a big fireplace. My job was keeping the fire. I could keep the fire going all week, and only use a single match for our whole stay. Every night before bed I banked the fire, burying some glowing coals under a thick bed of ash. The next evening I uncovered what remained of the coals, pushed them together, and used them to light a new fire.)

When I do clean out the ashes, I put the ashes on my mulch pile. Yeah, don’t dump them directly on valuable plants, but diluted in compost they are fine nutrients. (At least if you use clean wood.) We have oak trees, and aged oak is good fire wood, so we use that. Pine makes a mess, and can “pop” and send hot embers in unpredictable directions. Birch is pretty, but the bark is somewhat waterproof, so it doesn’t dry well, and so doesn’t burn well. Maple, hickory, apple, cherry, all burn well, too.

We have the chimney swept every year. I’m sure we don’t need to do it that often, but this way we don’t forget.

Enjoy your fire place.

35

Something a neighbor of mine didn’t learn until too late. He cleaned out his fireplace and dumped the ashes in the garage trash.

Sometime later, as he was sitting at his computer with headphones on, his back felt warm. The house was a total loss.

36

My family loves our fireplace. My kids beg to build a fire every time it is cold but it usually just a weekend thing. All electronics off, sitting around the fireplace in warm jammies with hot chocolate is a really nice time. I buy my oak from a guy down the road in relatively small amounts so I don’t have storage issues. Usually burn 2 or 3 pieces at a time. Got a metal container for the ashes.

37

Fireplace inserts were mentioned upthread and I wanted to share my neighbors experience.

Nice brick fireplace and they decided an insert would make it more efficient.

Unfortunately the insert only has space for chunks of wood approximately 10" long while most wood is cut at 18" or so.

He spends hours each week in his garage using a chop saw to cut the longer lengths down so they’ll fit. He buys a Harbor Freight saw with the extended warrentee and goes through at least one a year.

Seems like a complete waste of time and effort to me. I’ve got a cast iron stove that will take wood up to 21" long.

38

About 5 years ago, after my mom died, I bought her house and now I’m living in the house I grew up in. I have a fireplace in the living room. It has glass doors but no screen “curtain”. When I was a kid we used it quite a bit and burned all kinds of wood in it. It had a screen then but not doors. I think my dad had some work done on it around 1995 or so, including having a “cage” installed atop the chimney to keep birds out and sparks in. I’ve looked up the chimney and it looks like it’s never been used since it’s last cleaning. I’ve never used it since I moved in but it’s tempting because I have a huge supply of good, solid ash to burn. I enjoy fires and have them often outdoors. May do a small test fire in the fireplace and see how that goes.
Another thing to consider is depending on the height of your chimney and the wind conditions at the time, you may be smoking your neighbors when you use the fireplace. My next door neighbor uses a wood stove to heat his house in winter and usually I don’t notice the smoke but occasionally I can smell it in my house and especially the garage. Very occasionally it permeates the whole area. It doesn’t bother me, I kind of like the smell but something to consider if you have close neighbors.

39

I had a fireplace in my last apartment. I miss it since buying a home.

I only made fires a few times a winter. A easy cheat to start a fire is a duraflame log. Add your wood logs on each side. Put a small log on top. Be careful, and don’t crush the duraflame log.

The wax & sawdust duraflame log will burn at least 30 to 40 minutes and easily ignite the wood logs. I’ve never had any trouble getting a fire going.

I can start fires from kindling on camping trips. The wax logs save a lot of time at home.

40

I love a good wood-burning fire, but our fireplace makes the whole downstairs smell like ash when the weather changes, no matter what I clean or seal or patch.

I’ll be switching to gas logs when I save up some money.