Advantages of a Fireplace Insert

In these centrally-heated days, it’s been rare to find real fires keeping homes warm. But with wages stagnating and household bills rising, households are increasingly turning towards real fires not just for the romantic atmosphere, but for the monetary savings they can make.

With wood available cheaply (or even for free, depending on where you live), a real fire seems to make economic sense, but with up to 95% of the heat of a traditional fire going straight up the chimney, there is an efficiency problem with burning wood and coal.

Here at the Rotherham Fireplace Centre, we wanted to go through the advantages of a fireplace insert.

Less Mess

Getting around this problem can be tricky, but a fireplace insert could help. Fireplace inserts work to greatly increase the efficiency of your fireplace, retaining the heat and excluding the cold outside drafts, meaning your home gets warmer. Because chimney drafts are reduced, logs actually burn more slowly and at hotter temperatures, meaning that the room with the fire becomes warmer, and less fuel is burned, meaning you don’t need a fresh batch of logs every half an hour.

Fewer waste products such as smoke and ashes are created, as the wood burns more entirely- this means that there is less waste for you to clear up afterwards, and your fireplace won’t become as messy. Traditional fires send lots of a by-product called creosote up the chimney, and this builds up in dark and smoky deposits, and is actually a fire hazard itself- you will have heard of chimney fires, and creosote build-up is a leading cause of these. With a fireplace insert, less creosote is created, and therefore your risk of chimney fires is greatly reduced.

Environmentally Friendly

Fireplace inserts are actually pretty environmentally friendly. Because they burn wood more completely, they use less fuel and are therefore more sustainable. Because less soot and harmful byproducts of combustion are created, they actually cause less environmental pollution, too.

The Carbon Trust recommends wood as a fuel because it’s carbon neutral and sustainable: as it grows, it lets out oxygen into the air, and whether it rots or is burned, the same amount of carbon is released back into the atmosphere. As long as more trees are planted to replace the ones which are lost, wood is an environmentally friendly and totally renewable energy source, unlike gas, coal, or most electricity. A wood burning fireplace insert is therefore a responsible addition to your home, as well as a product which will save you money on your heating and energy bills for years to come.

Economical

With innovative venting systems and heat distribution fans, fireplace inserts are a modern technology which refine and improve a really traditional and pleasant way to heat your home: an open fireplace. A decent fireplace insert will mean that you can actually go for hours at a time without adding more fuel to the fire.

A fireplace insert will also add extra insulation to your home, meaning that it will keep warmer in winter and cooler in summer, as less outside air will be able to enter via the chimney. Because fireplace inserts cause your fires to burn more cleanly, chimney sweeping and cleaning costs are greatly reduced.

Finally, the appearance of your fireplace insert will be up to you: there are a range of design options on the market from traditional to modern, so improving the energy efficiency of your house can look good, too.

Here at the Rotherham Fireplace Centre, we are proud to provide a number of high quality fireplaces to suit our customers’ individual requirements and the style of their properties. For more information, get in touch with our friendly team of experts today – we’re happy to help with any enquiry.