Indoor Wood Fireplaces - Buying

If you're contemplating getting a fireplace for your home, give the following points some consideration:

• Use an EPA-certified fireplace. Besides reducing nuisance smoke from your fireplace for your neighbours, it also reduces your wood consumption because of its higher fuel efficiency. Smoke contains a lot of energy and it's pure waste when it goes up the chimney. EPA-certified fireplaces make very little or no smoke.  Do NOT allow your wood to smoulder!
• Provide a combustion air supply for your fireplace. All fireplaces consume a lot of air, which has to come from somewhere. If you don't provide your fireplace directly with combustion air supply, you will notice your house becoming very drafty when you are using your fireplace. HRV-equipped homes have minimal drafts because the make-up air comes in through the HRV's fresh air intake.
• Provide good circulation in your home. Obviously, the fireplace puts out a lot of heat so ensure that cool air from all rooms in the house can move to the fireplace for heating. This can be as simple as keeping all of the doors open or as sophisticated as tying the fireplace insert into your forced-air ducts.
• Avoid glass doors if heating is the prime consideration. Seeing a roaring fire behind the glass is nice in your living room but it can be a real pain to clean after a while.
• Keep the log length uniform.  The BIS Ultra has a tapered firebox which allows combustion air to flow to the back   If you pack the firebox with 20" logs in the front and 18" logs in the back, the logs in the back could potentially be starving for air, thereby reducing heat output.
• Use split wood if possible.  This creates more surface area for combustion and allows the wood to dry better while in storage.
• There is natural air circulation with a wood fireplace so additional fans and ducting aren't necessary.  Our fireplace has an insert blower as well as a ducting and and fan to move hot air from the insert into our gas furnace ducting.  We've found that we primarily want our main living space to be heated and it's better to keep the bedrooms cooler so lately we haven't used either of the 2 fireplace fans.
• You need to regularly sweep the chimney to remove creosote build-up.  Consider adding a roof hatch near your chimney so can avoid climbing around on the shingles.  Depending upon the layout, the chimney on a two storey house can be a challenge to reach with a ladder.  Traffic causes wear on the shingles which could require premature replacement.