As our calendar swings into the winter months, and with fuel and electricity costs being what they are, I decided I needed a better way to heat my home than simply run the heater all day and night; mainly, I needed to make better use of my fireplace, so I went shopping for wood inserts. As a fireplace owner, you’d think I’d have thought about inserts before, but, frankly, when I bought the house, I never even considered this bit of technology.
With the insert installed, I found that it works pretty well. With the insert and blower operating at full capacity, the average temperature of my house hovers at around sixty five degrees. In the middle of a hard winter, I find that’s pretty good. Now, I found that those self-cleaning glass doors works, which was a surprise to me, and it’s good to be able to still see the fire inside that clear glass. This winter, I’m using the fireplace around the clock and I’ve found no real defects to the device, and although I haven’t seen my bills this month, I’m suspecting that it’s paid for itself already. There are many different brands and manufacturers of these things, so it pays to do some study and find the right insert as well as the right type.
A funny thing happened when I picked up this insert — I started finding out about all my friends and acquaintances who also had inserts. One wondered about whether or not he shouldn’t have had a gas insert as opposed to a wood insert. Now, in a wood insert, there’s an air chamber that heats up, and blowers turn on and vent the heat when it hits the right temperature. He noted that the insert is similar to the gas inserts, except it doesn’t have a flue pipe. He then said he was thinking about putting in gas logs into the wood burning insert, but he wasn’t sure, but he’d done some research and found that in our state we didn’t need a flue pipe installed, but the dampers must be open. He had some questions: Could he use gas logs in the wood insert, could he open the damper if it was already in use. He thought the gas logs might work just the same as the wood logs.
If he’d done a little more research, he’d know that it’s not legal to try to use a wood insert as a gas insert. If he wanted his unit to be efficient, he’d have to make sure the gas insert was lined at the top, so there were a whole host of reasons why his idea wouldn’t work. Primarily, though, gas is quite a different fuel from wood and requires different things; if you want to be safe, efficient, and legal, I told him, keep burning the wood, or purchase a whole new outlet!
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