Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.
They will require breathing but much less than an open fireplace and a lot more of the heat will be kept inside and not sent through the chimney. So overall they’re way on the positive side. If you can get a cold air inlet it’s better, but it’s far from necessary.
By law new wood stoves in many places MUST have an outside air intake
> insert / stove
As a kid I lived in homes with both - and a home with a barrel stove - and as an adult with a pellet stove and I don’t remember that being a problem. Net, it was fine?