Gas or Wood Fireplaces

Gas or Wood Fireplaces-What’s Best?

If you’re dreaming of storybook winter comfort, odds are part of the image is cozying up to a warm fireplace! If you want to make the dream a reality, you’ll first need to consider whether you should burn wood, gas or recycled cellulose pellets. There are some considerations to this decision….

Ease of Use

The first consideration is ease of use. Gas fireplaces take home the gold in this category. Simply grab the remote control, turn it on, and voila! instant, a very realistic fire! Conversely, wood or pellet fires need to be lit, which can be a bother, schlepping wood into the house along with whatever else is in your woodpile can be an added chore!

Efficiency-Wood or Gas

A second consideration is efficiency. How much warmth is produced by what is being burned? Here again, gas wins the category. This is for several reasons. The first is that gas simply burns very cleanly, giving off no measurable particulants. In the state of California, gas appliances need to be vented to the outdoors.

The best gas fireplaces use a technology called ‘Direct Vent’. Direct vent fireplaces typically use a 2 flue pipes – one as an intake of air to the combustion area, and the other to exhaust the by-products of combustion.

Direct-Vent fireplaces always have a see-through glass front. This barrier prevents ‘conditioned’ air from inside your home (air that you’ve spent money warming up) from going up the chimney and out of the house. An open wood-burning fire may be what everyone thinks of when they imagine a fireplace, but they actually are very inefficient. While they are radiating heat into the room, huge amounts of conditioned air is leaving your house through the chimney, making your furnace work extra hard. With a gas direct-vent fire, the furnace normally doesn’t even come on!

Air Quality–What’s Best?

A third consideration is air quality. In the area we live, many days are classified as ‘spare the air’ days. This means it is illegal to burn a wood or pellet fire. However, burning a gas fireplace is totally acceptable on Spare the Air day

Put simply, wood fires add particulants and pollutants to the air. Many of you have driven into a valley when its rainy and cold, and lots of people are burning wood. The inversion effect makes it so you can hardly breathe! That is the effect of all the particulants in the air. Its only a matter of time before it will be completely illegal to burn wood in your fireplace in the Bay Area.

Safety–What Is Your Best Choice?

Another consideration is safety. Since wood fires burn very inefficiently, many of the byproducts of combustion solidify and stick to the sides of the chimney flue. These byproducts are called ‘creosote, and when there is enough of a buildup, can result in what is called a chimney fire – which is exactly what it sounds like – a fire in your chimney. Chimney fires can easily turn into a house fire and are very dangerous.

That’s why it’s so important to have your chimney professionally ‘swept’  or cleaned once or twice a year. This maintenance is crucial to a safe system. Gas fireplaces never need to have their chimney cleaned, unless a bird or rodent makes a nest in it.

Gas Direct Vent fireplaces are classified by the government as a ‘Heating Appliance’, which means they are efficient, safe heaters just like a furnace. They feature a gas safety valve which turns off the flow of gas in the unlikely event of an unsafe situation detected, like a clogged chimney or burner blowing out.

Cleanliness–Wood or Gas?

The last consideration is cleanliness. When you turn your gas fireplace off, there is no ash to sweep up, no dirt that got tracked in with the wood. Simply put, your home stays cleaner!

All these reasons help explain why folks with gas fireplaces use them so much more than their friends who have wood or pellet fireplaces. You walk into a home with a gas fireplace, and you can feel the warmth radiating from the hearth and see all the pets and family members happily soaking in the warmth!

Come down to the friendly, knowledgeable folks at Villa Terrazza in Sonoma, and let’s talk warmth, ambiance and your best choice when it comes to warming your home!