Fireplaces are inefficient and expensive, poolute a hell of a lot, and a lot of effort. Heatpumps are simple effecient and the cheapest to run and maintain.
In my country its usually required for new builds to have 2 methods of heating. People usually have gas or heat pumps as primary but almost all of them puts a fireplace as well in the house, so chimneys here are very common.
I also have a fireplace additional to a heat pump, but I would only use it if there was a power outage for multiple days during winter.
So yeah, fireplaces are mainly for the vibes :)
Pretty sure most people just use fireplaces for vibes these days.
Fireplaces? Sure. The furnace still gets used for actual heating in the winter. Anyone wanna buy me a ground source heat pump and pay for installation, I’ll rip the furnace out.
I’ll never live somewhere without a woodstove again. Two weeks without power, and 20F/-6.5C inside the house will change a person lol
Woodstoves are nice as an option but I’ll just take backup power any day. Gas pressure is normally still fine for a long time durring most outages and it takes very little power to just run the blower fan on a gas furnace. I’ve run mine off my vans inverter using an extension cord and some farmer grade wiring practices at one point with no issue. Plus I can also power other things with backup power. If it’s an extended outage then most gas furnaces can easily be converted to run on propane and swapping out tanks is much easier than dealing with fueling a woodstove.
As you reach city limits in a lot of cities, it is increasingly likely that you will no longer find gas lines, city water, or sewers. Having a backup heat source is pretty comforting. Much like you, I used to rely on just gas with a generator for backup, but I’ve experienced frozen gas mains, so I like having a woodstove and a couple cords of wood to burn as a backup source of heat. Plus it’s very cozy on damp, cold days, and nicer than the fireplace channel on Christmas.
At least in my area, propane is the goto if you have no city gas hookup. If you want to go oldschool then you have a fuel oil furnace. Keeping enough wood on hand to heat a house over the winter just isn’t practical for most. Even just heating his wood shop just while he is using it my dad can burn through 3 full cords of wood every winter. My grandpa used to heat his trailer house with wood and he often went through 4-5 full cords in the winter.
I 100% agree that wood is cozy but it’s way easier to just keep a tank of propane or fuel oil on hand.
For sure, most use oil or propane as a primary heat source when gas isn’t available. But those rely on both expensive fossil fuel and electricity to run, so a backup that doesn’t depend on either is handy, especially with all these once in a century storms we get every year now. Wood makes for a cheap, effective backup. Used to be so common in housing too. Now we just get gas furnaces and gas fireplaces for show. Still, I wouldn’t go out of my way to get a woodstove. I agree that a backup generator is plenty for most situations. But if you have an older home with a fireplace, keep a half cord around and make sure the chimney is clean.
Yeah, I thought I was missing something as I was read that and thinking, “ok, fair, but where does the gas come from?”
My in laws have a massive tank on their property for their natgas powered backup generator (which apparently kicks on a few times a month…
Gas isn’t an option here unfortunately
Where’s that? 2 weeks in certain places and millions are dead, essentially precautions are taken at the supplier level.
How about not living somewhere where this is even a possibility in the first place. 🥲 2 Weeks, wtf…
I’d also argue for solar panels / a small consumer wind turbine and a battery backup (which can power the heatpump) instead of architecture from the last millenia.
Solar is not great for heating in winter because solar produces very little energy in winter (which is literally the reason why winter is cold in the first place: less solar radiation).
So even if you have solar, unless your installation is massively oversized you generally don’t have spare every in winter for heating.
Small consumer wind turbines make sense only in limited cases, and I say that as someone who had been building some. Because places with a strong constant wind are limited and generally this is not when houses are built.
See https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
No, what we need is seasonal batteries. A way to store the surplus or solar energy in summer to use it for heating in winter.
Wood is exactly that, solar energy stored in a stable chemical form that is easy to use.
I’d love to have solar, but solar isn’t great here due to lack of sunlight but it still works. Also I don’t have $30k.
Makes sense if you happen to find a building with pre-existing fireplace of course (even though upkeep is still pricey depending on its construction). Face-to-face less though, adding a proper chimney during construction is also pricey and the additional income / cost-savings of PV over its lifetime will very quickly make it way superior in a direct comparison.
Yeah it’s good emergency prep
they’re also able to work completely without electricity and fuel transport (depending on your situation), which is increasingly becoming a concern in some parts of the world.
my optimal setup is an air-to-water heat pump connected in parallel with a wood furnace fitted with a flue gas afterburner, feeding a hot water tank. we already have a big thermal mass in the house so the heat pump would keep the temp stable 99% of the time, but sometimes it gets close to -40 and then it’s good to have massive heating capacity.
My family insist on using the fireplace because they have some backward ideas about it being natural and cheaper because there’s so much wood around here. They use it way more than necessary, and use more wood than necessary, so a load runs out very fast and it often gets so hot they have to open the windows.
I like the aesthetic, but it’s a massive waste of time and money. Sourcing wood is expensive. Stacking it takes a lot of time, during which I could be doing productive work.
I’m sure the smoke is affecting our health, too. If I go for an early run on a cold morning the smoke hanging in the air makes it much harder to breath.
I might understand if there wasn’t a very good heat pump right there. The running costs of it are barely noticeable.
100% agree. I love the vibe of a fire place so I definitely have a fake one though.
A heat pump is £10k to buy and install, that ain’t cheap. In fact that would buy me enough wood to heat my house for 50 winters.
Comparing the initial costs of one with the upkeep costs of the other surely is a way to make a bad argument sound more sensible.
Pretty sure heat pumps have higher maintenance costs as well.
Fire is dirt cheap, that’s why a good chunk of the world still uses it as their principal source of cooking and heating. They’re not doing it for the vibes.
Hear pumps are great, they have many advantages but cost is not one. Hopefully that’ll change.
Not saying it’s for free once set up, that would be silly. I just like fair comparisons. 🙂 I don’t concur though that it’s more expensive though.
Heavily depends where you live of course, but in Western Europe and many other “western” nations wood / lumber has become awfully expensive with no indication of it changing, so newer homes are most likely more financially efficient to use a heatpump (especially if you’re able to also afford a few solar panels). We don’t have to fear week-long outages either (even the extremely unlikely case of a national outage like in Spain is fully resolved within 3 days), so even if you don’t have some solar panels and a small battery to power the pump the likelihood of you ever needing a fire to warm up in a new building (which are well insulated) is absurdly tiny. And those pumps really don’t need a lot of power.
Given costs for lumber and regular professional cleaning and maintenance (again, depending on where you live) I’d assume a fireplace with chimney to be at least equally expensive if not more, at least in countries with no easy access to lumber and proper regulations in place (so most of the “developed” countries, assumably). If you have proper quality studies to prove me otherwise please go ahead, it’s all just opinion so far. The only ones I know are comparisons between either heatpumps and classical heating solutions, or comparisons of CO² emitions.
Deep down you really know that it would only last you like 7 years including the cost of buying and installing a fireplace. Then you gotta pay for a shed/cover to keep the wood dry and storage of it for at least a year.
Nope.
Fireplace is a mistake - it will make most of the house colder. What you want is a wood stove, and a simple metal chimney is much cheaper than the brick one you’re imagining.
Also, a shed isn’t needed - make a round pile (shaker pile or holzhauzen) and shingle it with the bark (or a tarp if you’re lazy). Drying takes 6-9 months, not a year, but I like not to be rushed so I try to keep two piles - one I’m building over the warm months, and when the cold months come I pull from the other that had a year to season.
As for space, they don’t take much. A 6’ tall cylinder with a 5’’ radius holds about 4 cords once the cone on top is taken into account. I find a 4’ radius easier to manage, but that’s closer to 2.5 cords.
Nope not thinking of an old style one. That sound like so much effort. I would rather press a button to have the hear come on. And if is too hot. Press a button to turn it off. And also not need any space for a pile of wood
Then you’re paying for convenience, not heating. Whole different ballgame.
Playing less money and the convenience to have my whole house heated! Ofcourse!
Less money over 10 or 20 years sure. Short term you’re paying way more.
If I had 20k EUR to spend, I’d get a heat pump too. Unfortunately I’m stuck with my 40 year old furnace that’s completely manual. If I were to replace the whole thing with an automatic modern one that burns pellets, it’d be under 10k, and a regular one maybe 5k.
I do have an air source heat pump but that is more of a supplemental heater and summertime cooler. I’d need 5 of these to heat the whole house and my electric bill would far exceed what I spend on briquettes for the winter.
What does it cost to buy and install a wood burner?
£2k. And £50 a year for a chimney sweep.
Unless you’re cheap like me and buy the brush yourself.
When I bought my house, I had the option to add a fireplace. I refused. First, I didn’t want to pay for it, second, I didn’t want to clean it, so I would have only used it a handful of times a year, mostly around Christmas. The house I grew up in had a brick fireplace in the living room. I only remember it being lit two or three times at the most. Probably for the same reason I didn’t get one, my dad didn’t want to clean it.
The big, monolithic blocks standing vertically at the side of the house are today, mostly just show–just a framed box for an 8" steel pipe inside. Possibly many houses you see have a chimney, just not the sort you’re looking for.
You know I was just wondering if new houses have fireplaces.
You get a better energy rating on your house if you don’t
We haven’t had fireplaces since the 50s.
There’s better ways to heat your house than burning wood. We’re not vikings.
… Having a fireplace doesn’t mean you don’t have a furnace.
Not with that attitude
Ok, but how do you get rid of evidence?
I have one right now, with external air supply and a heat exchanger that feeds the heat from the exhaust into my heat buffer for warm water and the heated floors in the rest of the house.
I have my own bit of forest just like basically everyone else in the village, there is no reason to not make use of the scraps that fall off of that during the year.
But then again, I have inherited some very viking-ish genes from my dad’s side and I channel the urge to pillage and burn into getting something from the freezer and then curl up with my dog in front of the fire.
Yes, of course I also have solar thermal energy, photovoltaics, battery buffer and a heat pump, I’m not stuck in the past. I just like to have options.
I live in a geodesic dome and I have a free-standing wood-burning stove as a supplemental heat source in my master bedroom which overlooks the living room.
It is capable of heating the entire house by itself, but I only use it like two or three times a year.
That being said, it’s often very nice to start a fire on a cold day and have a girl over and have the fire. It’s a good excuse to not be wearing any clothes.
Florida here. What’s a “chimney”?
It’s a way for the invasive pythons to get in and eat you in the night
I recently saw a return of the “chimney”, but now they’re large grated cubes with the aircon unit inside. Instead of hanging an ugly box off the side of the wall, they’re up on the roof and camouflaged a bit.
Where is this? Because where I live, whole-house AC units sit on the ground next to the home.
A lot of newer homes being built (at least in California) are putting them in the attic or on the roof.
I know a city in California with the heat exchangers on the roof. Do you have any idea why? (The properties were large enough the footprint wouldn’t be an issue.)
Where I am in the USA Midwest the heat exchangers are all on the ground as they are easier to install and maintain.
Looks and maybe energy efficiency (if done correctly) would be the biggest reasons I can think of.
Me in my mid-century ranch style: shim… knee?
We had a huge ice storm in 2007 across the entire state of Oklahoma. The whole state was without power. I didn’t have a chimney, and neither did anyone else I knew. It was easy to freeze to death as every road was ice, or covered with fallen trees. It took a month to get an electrician to fix our rental house, and we stayed with my dad who heated his house with the oven burners that used natural gas. You could die that way, but it was below freezing so we had no choice.
My next house had a chimney, and I got a small generator. I’ve had to use them both, since.
I will always have a chimney for emergency heat!
You’re not really selling me on Oklahoma
