Why America Loves Gas Fireplaces

Beauty First

• A fireplace is a room’s centerpiece, and as such it has to be pleasing to the eye.  Today’s gas fireplaces are just that, with elegant designs that range from traditional to ultra-contemporary and feature log sets engineered to look almost exactly like real, crackling wood burning in your firebox.

Clean burning

• With recent strict EPA emissions standards, gas fireplaces on the market now are extremely clean-burning and friendly to the environment.  In fact, unless a new fireplace design meets or exceeds EPA regulations, you’ll never see it for sale in a hearth store.

Easy to operate

• There’s something nostalgic about chopping and hauling wood logs, storing them, carrying them into the house, and stacking them with some tinder and finally getting a fire going.  There’s also something potentially messy and time-consuming about all that.  Why not switch to gas – and say goodbye to clean-up and difficult fire-starting?

Low maintenance

• Because gas is so clean, your venting system will stay clean for a very long time.  Compare this to wood-burning fireplaces, whose chimneys need annual chimney sweep services to remove flammable creosote.  Add sweeping the floor and cleaning ash and debris out of the firebox, and you can see why gas fireplaces are your best choice for low-maintenance.

Heat efficiency

• A heat-efficiency rating tells you the percentage of heat generated in a fireplace that’s available for heat in a room.  Vented gas fireplaces commonly have ratings between 70% and 85%, while B-vent models (single pipe) come in at around 50%.  For perspective, you’re lucky to get a 20% to 30% rating out of a traditional masonry fireplace – and often it’s more like 10%.

Placement options

• Because of venting systems far less stringent than with wood fireplaces, a new gas fireplace easily can be placed in many rooms throughout your home.  These units are ideal for zone heating in kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, dens and any other rooms that need periodic, quick heat. People give long lists of reasons for preferring high-powered modern gas fireplaces.  Perhaps at the top of most lists is the fact that when you come home in freezing weather after a hard day of work, soothing heat from your fireplace is just seconds away.  And if it’s not quite warm enough, use your handy remote to crank it up higher.  That’s what’s called a very simple problem-solver.