The fireplace has long been the popular spot to gather in the American home. An area for warmth, the fireplace adds ambiance, sparking memories that are to be admired. With all the advantages that a fireplace can bring, some significant downsides can cause a love for the fireplace to wane if not discussed.
With rising energy costs, the leading negative of owning a fireplace has to be its inefficiency. The fireplace does certainly radiate warmth in its general vicinity when there is a fire burning. Still, it also creates a convection current that causes the chimney and your furnace to work harder pulling conditioned air out of the room and up. When the fire is not burning, a fireplace has a damper that should prevent the inside air from escaping and the outside from invading. The problem is this type of damper technology hasn’t changed in over 100 years! The damper is mostly made of metal and has no seal, which means that the damper is incredibly inefficient.
Your home has a nasty little secret, and the fireplace that is designed to warm your house is doing the opposite and costing you hundreds of dollars in energy costs. Don’t fret, and with a bit of investment of time and money, you can turn that inefficient fireplace into an effective heater that will decrease your energy bills and add even more beauty to the existing fireplace.
This blog post has four things you can do to drastically overcome the heating costs correlated with fireplace inefficiency.
1. Top Sealing Dampers or Chimney cap
Top Sealing Dampers replace the fireplace throat damper and are connected at the head of the chimney. The top sealing damper has a seal that performs like a storm door holding the costly conditioned air inside the home and the outside air outside. Whether you’re heating or cooling your home, this principle works year-round, . Dampers is a product which can be purchased online and is easily installed by either a homeowner or a handyman.
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2.Fireback
A fireback is constructed with a cast iron plate that is at the back of your fireplace. The fireback improves the fireplace’s efficiency by consuming the heat from the fire and radiating the heat back into the room. Its goal is to preserve the back wall from fire damage, and it regularly highlights a design that adds to the home’s furnishings.Â
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3. Fireplace Heater
A Fireplace heater draws fresh air from the room, distributes it through a chamber that heats by the fire, and then drives the heated air back into the room. These heaters are enclosed systems, so no smoke from the fireplace is overrunning the home. Depending on which kind you purchase, these heaters can make a significant difference in your home’s temperature, even heating an entire room on its own. Particular fireplace heaters can be installed with fireplace glass doors to boot your cost savings up another notch.
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4. Fireplace Glass DoorsÂ
Fireplace Glass Doors will likely carry the most significant investment, but you can lessen some of that cost by doing some of the work yourself. Several fireplace doors can be purchased online and come with easy-to-install instructions. The fireplace glass door produces a barrier between the living space and the chimney, thus decreasing your furnace’s area to heat. The benefit of holding the heat in is an excellent incentive to add these doors, but it’s not the only reason. Fireplace glass doors offer another level of protection for the home by guarding children and pets against the fire. If you have a wood-burning fireplace, you will want to purchase the screen mesh created to go with the fireplace glass doors. The mesh will allow you to have the doors open while the fire is burning and still have your home protected from sparks and embers. Fireplace glass doors are now fabricating with modern designs and add beauty and charm to the fireplace.
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We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth—we build them for the warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.
-Edna Ferber
If you’re handy, all of these suggestions are easy to accomplish. In addition, while difficult to find locally, all of the products can easily be purchased online. If you’re concerned about high energy costs, but want to keep your fireplace, then it’s time to plug up the holes in your monthly energy budget by plugging up the gaps in your fireplace.
