Cutting heating costs with your fireplace

Fireplaces are great aren’t they? There is nothing like the aroma and warmth of a good fire on a crisp day. That crackling coziness that soothes your mind and warms your heart. It’s all good until you get your heating bill and find out that wonderful fireplace is sucking all the heat from your home and all your money right up the chimney.

We turned our fireplace into an efficient way to warm our home. We bought a fireplace insert that is designed to fit in our masonry fireplace. It acts sort of like a wood stove only you don’t cook on it.

Our insert is the Lopi Freedom. We’ve had it a few years now and it saves us 40-60% off of our heating bills in the cold months. We shopped for this thing like we would for a car. There are many makes and models. We chose the Lopi for it’s efficiency, size, heating capacity (1200-2000 sq ft), log capacity and lastly for it’s design. But it really is a beautifully made product.

The Lopi can accept logs up to 18 inches, which is very nice. We load it up and within 20 minutes a built in fan kicks in. (Kicks in when it is hot enough to do so). Then we turn the furnace thermostat OFF and turn ON the house fan, this will help circulate your hot insert air throughout your home. It heats our first floor pretty well with temps ranging from 70-80 degrees. (Sometimes hotter in which case we’ll just open a door)

The drier, better seasoned (cured) wood works best and gets the fire going faster. To cure wood you’ll need to let it sit in a dry place, covered (yet able to circulate air) for 7-12 months. *Wood that is too moist will sizzle a lot, take a long time to light, give off a lot of smoke and give off low heat. *Wood seasoned properly will give you the most heat and the least amount of creosote. (Creosote is what clogs up your chimney and can start a fire)

The air from the room flows around the insert, heats, and the built in fan throws the heat from the insert back into the room.  You can control the fan output and the intensity of the burn as well.

They also say it’s safe to load up the insert before bed and continue to heat your home while you sleep without worrying about catching your house on fire.  We’ve went to bed several times with it still burning.

Of course this all means you need wood. Ahhh, there’s the ‘catch’. Wood isn’t cheap. You may have to buy it, but you can probably find it here and there after storms or from people looking to get rid of it after removing a tree.

Good To Know:

But you cannot burn all wood, and not all wood burns equally.

* Never buy or take wood with bugs in it. (ewe!)
* Never buy or take wood that is rotten or diseased (double ewe!)
* Never burn pine indoors.
* Hardwood burns longer and more efficiently than softwood.
* Softwoods pop and crack, their pitch content is higher and they burn at lower temps than hardwood. (higher amounts of creosote in your chimney)
* Softwoods are about half as dense as Hardwoods, therefore to get the same amount of heat, you would need to burn twice as much softwood.

Green Wood: Freshly cut. A lot of moisture. Hard to ignite. Produces a lot of creosote. Don’t burn inside!

Hardwoods (examples include: Oak, Apple, Hickory, Maple & Black Walnut)
Lasts long but hard to start, more heat value than softwoods

Softwoods (examples include: Pine, Fir, and Cottonwood)
Easier to ignite, burns faster, doesn’t last as long as hardwood

What the heck is a ‘cord’ of wood?
Ahhh, since math was my least favorite subject this is my least favorite thing to explain. Simply it is when you stack your wood and it comes out in an evenly stacked pile of 8 ft. long, 4 ft. deep and 4 ft. tall.

Or, in ‘our terms’ it’s filling up a full sized pick-up truck bed with evenly stacked wood….two times. 

*Note:  This is NOT a  commercial or advertisement from Lopi.  It is simply our experience.