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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.
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
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.
Where’s that? 2 weeks in certain places and millions are dead, essentially precautions are taken at the supplier level.
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.
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 :)
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.
What does it cost to buy and install a wood burner?
£2k. And £50 a year for a chimney sweep.
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.
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
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.
Not with that attitude
… Having a fireplace doesn’t mean you don’t have a furnace.
Ok, but how do you get rid of evidence?
Pigs.
Me in my mid-century ranch style: shim… knee?
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.
The roofs were hot. I expect ground level in the shade of the house would be better for efficiency.
Perhaps it had something to do with the location of the indoor unit? I am used to them in the basement or first floor, but some places put them in the ceiling.
I would rather have like a wood stove than a fireplace. We get cold winters where I live in America and with our infrastructure getting crappier I would find comfort in having that little wood stove in case the power goes out for a long time.
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
