After several months of high heating bills, many homeowners looking for ways to reduce their home heating costs start thinking about heating their homes or at least supplementing their home heating with a wood burning fireplace or wood stove. While this idea sounds appealing and a fireplace or wood stove can add a pleasant atmosphere to the room, heating with wood is not a very practical idea for most people.
First, a fireplace is a very inefficient way to create heat for your home. In order to work properly, a fireplace draws air from inside your home and exhausts it out the chimney along with the smoke, carbon monoxide, and other combustion gasses. That air is replaced with cool air drawn into your home from outdoors making heating with an open fireplace ineffective.
On the other hand, a properly installed wood stove can be an effective way to supplement your heat, particularly a properly installed modern wood stove that uses an outside air kit to draw combustion air from outside into the stove. However, once you factor in the cost of the wood, the stove, installation, maintenance, tools, and time spent cutting, splitting and stacking wood, for the vast majority of people a woodstove doesn’t make economic sense.
For most homeowners, a fireplace or woodstove is best used to add ambiance and charm to your home. For serious savings on home heating, your money is better to spend on a modern high-efficiency furnace or heat pump or by having an HVAC system efficiency analysis performed by a reputable HVAC contractor like Holland Heating and Cooling.
Your HVAC contractor can recommend an energy efficiency package that will provide long-term energy savings.
