Choosing a Quality Fireplace for the Kalamazoo Winter
With the fall here in full, it’s time to start considering how you plan on keeping yourself and your family warm for the nearing winter. Before you make a decision, though, we’d like to make an argument for the ultimate cozy winter warming source: the fireplace.
Though fireplaces certainly aren’t a way to heat an entire home, the heat that they do offer in the rooms they’re placed in make for ideal winter evenings. To help you achieve the winter ideal of curling up on a couch with loved ones, warmed by a fireplace in the midwinter, we’d like to take today’s blog post to detail the qualities you should look for when purchasing a fireplace for your home.
Determining the Right Fireplace for You
When you’re determining the right fireplace for your home, there are a few factors to keep in mind that you might not expect. First of all, you may not have thought about this: what does the fireplace look like when your fireplace isn’t lit? When purchasing fireplaces, we tend to only think about what it would look like while it’s actually in use. Most of the time, however, your fireplace won’t actually be lit, so it’s important to keep that in mind when making a decision.
Additionally, you’ll also want to take the length and difficulty of the installation process into consideration. Depending on the fireplace, the installation process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. During the time that your fireplace is being installed, you likely won’t be able to use that room for its intended purposes, so make sure that you purchase a fireplace that doesn’t take long to install if you’ll be needing to use that room in the near future.
Choosing a Fireplace Type
Before you pull the trigger on your purchase, you should also consider which of the three main varieties: wood fireplaces, gas fireplaces, and electric fireplaces.
Wood Fireplaces. Tried and true, wood fireplaces are second to none when it comes to that classic, natural feeling of home fireplaces. That being said, if you’ve never had an indoor wood fireplace before, you should be aware of some drawbacks. Chimney installation, for instance, can be prohibitively expensive depending on how large of a chimney you’ll need to install. Additionally, wood fires are the most effort to keep clean, since they burn wood into ash, unlike electric and gas fires. With all this in mind, wood fireplaces are classics for their cheap fuel, rustic aesthetic, and lack of reliance on utilities such as electricity.
Gas Fireplaces. The second most popular type of fireplace, gas fireplaces are lauded as a solid replacement to wood fireplaces for their realism and reliability. Additionally, gas fireplaces create very little smoke compared to wood fireplaces. Between their lack of woodfire-created ashes and minimal smoke, gas fireplaces are an amazing choice for homeowners that don’t want to work so hard to maintain their fireplace. Even so, you’ll need to have proper ventilation to ensure that you’re not left with an undesirable gas scent in your home.
Electric Fireplaces. Though not many consider electric fireplaces for their home, they boast a set of advantages that neither wood fireplaces nor gas fireplaces can offer. First of all, it’s much easier to adjust the heat of electric fireplaces than wood and gas fireplaces, since you can increase or decrease the heat output much more finely. Additionally, electric fireplaces are generally considered the safest fireplaces, since they don’t have any burning logs that could roll out of place or any gas that could leak or be left running. On the flipside, however, electric fireplaces are seen by some as the least “realistic” form of a fireplace, since they don’t actually create heat using an open flame.
Are you interested in purchasing and installing your dream fireplace for the winter ahead? If so, don’t hesitate to contact us here at JP Heating & Air Conditioning today.
