This is what most folks think they have, and what most fireplaces are styling themselves after. These are your standard fireplace, usually pre 1960’s construction, brick and stone built old school fireplaces. These boast open face design, full masonry from top to bottom, and you may have a strange metal door on your basement wall, directly under your fireplace. These fireplaces burn only wood, and can be converted to gas, can have doors added to them, and can accept high efficiency gas and wood burning inserts. These also usually have a rectangular damper above the firebox.

Heatilators are a standard masonry fireplace, with a few twists. In an attempt to create more heat in the home, designers put a steel firebox inside the masonry, and connected some tubes to it, leading to some grates in the face of the fireplace. Some even have fans behind the grates that may or may not work. The steel box and tubes would heat up from burning the wood, and radiate the heat into the room, in theory. Anyone who has used one of these, knows it does, in fact, NOT produce much more heat at all than the standard. These fireplaces can be very challenging to convert to a high efficiency insert.

Another type of fireplace is built in a factory, and sent out to be installed in your new home, usually while the home is being constructed. Metal triple wall firebox with hard metal piping, this type of fireplace became very popular in the late 70’s and are still being installed today. The fireplace breathes the air from your home for the combustion process, and really all the time, unless the damper is closed, there is a good chance you have a giant heat sucker, instead of a fireplace. The damper is almost always about 6-8” diameter, and lots of models came with bifold doors. ALWAYS BURN WITH DOORS OF FIREPLACE OPEN.

There would be no ash cleanout in the basement on a prefab fireplace, and lots of times, the exterior chimney is vinyl or wood siding. These units are great for accepting gas inserts to upgrade the fireplace to one that is high efficiency, and will cook you compared to the old prefab!

More affordable than an insert, gas logs give you the fire you’ve been looking for, at an affordable cost. But there’s a catch. These cute little appliances EAT. Lots of times, the fireplace uses just as much gas as the whole home furnace!

The real kicker is, these appliances are just decorative, because of the design they do not produce much heat at all, and making them maybe 10-20 % efficient at best in our opinion.

Modern Day Gas inserts, fireplaces, and stoves have come a very long way in their efficiencies, and now are listed as furnaces. Up to 85% efficient, these appliances look great, don’t consume much gas to use, and they can cook you out of the space! These appliances sold in the US are all UL listed and labeled to be safe and reliable heat sources, and many small homes and cottages use these as the primary source of heat! They also work in power outages, which is when your fun, cozy investment becomes the family hero.

These units can be installed in lots of different spaces, and can be an amazing upgrade to you home, and your family.

So while all those things are the same, here is how the 3 appliances differ:

A Gas fireplace could be set right on the subfloor of your new addition/reno/build ect. and vented out a special hard metal chimney pipe. These units are installed when there is no existing fireplace at all.

A Gas Stove is very similiar to the fireplace above, but requires no additional building to close it up, it sits right out in the open, on a hearthpad of some kind, and radiaites heat from all around it’s body and pipe, into the room.

A Gas insert would go into an existing masonry or prefab fireplace, with a new 2 pipe liner sleeved through the existing vent for your fireplace. These units can not be set on any type of combustible surface, and must be measured to fit properly. There is also a surround that makes your fireplace look brand new.

No matter what you’re burning, it it’s got legs, it’s a stove. These are the tried and true means of heating the home, and they have stood through the test of time, and are still wildly popular today. Cast iron, reliable, and works in a power outage, there is a reason the gas or wood models sell so well, still today. Heat radiates from all directions into the home, these appliances are wonderful at transferring of heat, staying warm well after you have turned off the burners, and just being great.