Fireplaces vs. Wood Stoves vs. Zero-Clearance Inserts

We always wanted to have a fireplace. There is a strong emotional component to having a central hearth, and watching wood burn on a cold winter’s night is wonderful.

Our original plan had it on the staircase wall, like this:

and in elevation:

It seemed so cool. We imagined a floating, wall-mounted sideboard that happened to have a fireplace in it, very modern and chic. We thought that we’d build a half wall over the staircase so that the stovepipe could run up it. In short, we spent so long planning it and discussing it that we were pretty blindered to reality by the time building happened.

As the wall was being built, we quickly realized that there simply wasn’t room for a big, horizontal, sideboard-type fireplace. I looked around and found a small stove that would fit. I took a photo of the wall and Photoshopped in the stove to scale:

We had lost our sideboard idea. We also realized that we liked the light coming down from the upstairs windows, and didn’t want to build the half-wall for the stovepipe. So the pipe would have to run in midair all the way to the upstairs ceiling. Less than ideal. But it still wasn’t enough to make us reconsider.

Our “the emperor has no clothes” moment happened when our friend Beth Cochran stopped by. “Why aren’t you putting the fireplace against that wall?” she asked, with all the guilelessness and innocence of someone who hadn’t spent months obsessing over the house in paper form.

We had our various rehearsed arguments we had thought of over the months when the entire project had been theoretical, but in the end we conceded she had a great point. We looked at it this way and that. I remember at one point thinking that both locations had their pros and cons, and that it probably didn’t make too big a difference in the end.

We played with little pieces of paper that represented the furniture on the living room blueprints to see how we might use the room differently. We realized that our main fear – that the room would become too narrow for the couches if the fireplace was against the wall – was essentially unfounded.

We moved the stove.

Here a few photos of what it looked like as it came to life:

Once the stove was in:

The psychological change since that switch has been enormous. Now we can’t imagine having put the stove on the other wall. It seems like the entire heart of the house would have been missing if we’d left it on the staircase wall.

The move of the fireplace was interesting not for the facts of the case, but for the process of decision-making. I think it happens more often than you’d care to think: decisions that don’t get made as much as hardened as they accrete sufficient history, time, and effort. At some point there is just so much investment in the path taken that it is incredibly hard to look at the facts anew. Even when the facts are obviously in contradiction with the chosen course.

A few more notes regarding fireplaces that I learned while doing the research:

1. Traditional fireplaces are well-known to be a terrible idea from a heating perspective. When you light an open fireplace, you’re essentially creating a draft that pulls warm air up and out of the house. The fire radiates only a little heat into the room when it is lit, and at all other times the (typically metal, typically ill-fitting) damper allows heat to rise out of the chimney.

2. I was confused by the categories: wood stoves (applies to any wood-burning unit other than a traditional fireplace, but typically means a freestanding cast iron unit), fireplace inserts (designed to be inserted into an existing masonry fireplace), and zero-clearance fireplace insert (does not require an existing masonry fireplace, but still has fairly strict regulations regarding proximity to combustible materials.

3. Wood stove design has been completely overhauled since 1990 due to EPA regulations limiting the amount of smoke to 7.5 grams of smoke per hour. The best get down to about 1 gram/hour and can have efficiencies of 78%. They are typically free-standing pellet stoves. (See the whole EPA list as of Jan 10, 2010). Our zero-clearance insert is rated at at 4.8 gm/hr and 63% efficiency, ratings that are about standard for the style of stove.

4. Some of the higher-rated stoves have catalytic converters, which in theory are a great idea. Rising smoke travels through a honey-combed, catalyst-coated grid. The catalysts reignite the smoke, burning particulates and releasing heat. In practice, apparently, they tend to soot up quite quickly and require regular replacement. The other way of achieving reduced particulates and higher efficiency is to raise the temperature of the fire, which can be done through design and clever use of insulating materials.

5. We installed a hose for dedicated fresh air intake so our stove won’t backdraft.

6. Fans to blow air around the stove and into the room are a great idea. Make sure the model you choose has one.

7. There comes a point when you have to pull the plug on research. We were generally horrified by the curlicued, bad-bed-and-breakfast design of most wood stoves, and really liked the simple, clean lines of the BIS Nova. We also wanted a wood stove, not one built for pellets. And we’re not going to use this for primary heating; to a significant degree our stove will be for the ambiance.