The Fireplace Inserts Stoves

If you come from up North in the United States, you may have come in contact with an invention called a "Heatilator." In essence such a product was supposed to heat up your room that featured a fireplace, by having the logs in the fireplace heat up the metal that was surrounding the inside of the fireplace and the heat was dispersed through vents that had fans in them to move the hot air into the room. The original Heatilator was patented in 1927. Since then, there have been some pretty phenomenal advances made in converting the fireplace into a working well functioning heat source.

Today fireplace inserts stoves are much smarter, and work much more efficiently as well as meeting the US Standards that the government has issued over these. First a few bits of definitions are in order.

A stove is ordinarily a detached entity or unit that is situated away from a wall; it is a freestanding heat source. An insert on the other hand, is a heating unit that is literally inserted into an existing masonry, brick or factory built open fireplace. A fireplace ordinarily is used in either remodeling or in a new construction. It sometimes is installed aligned with a wall or it may be actually framed so that it is within a wall. Now looking back over the title of this article, it should make much more sense to you.

One of the original problems that the Heatilator had was twofold First is that smoke carried with it a tremendous amount of heat that went up and out of the flue instead of heating the room, and thus it was not as efficient as it could be. Secondly the amount of pollutants that were released into the atmosphere were downright horrendous.

Modern fireplace inserts stoves have done away with both problems. For instance inserts are now manufactured so that the inserts are now connected directly into the chimney, rather than actually circumventing of the chimney which was done in the past, making the inserts difficult to light, and extremely smoky affairs that brought black soot into your room.

Made of corrosion resistant stainless steel you may now have an insert that connects all the way up the chimney. This has greatly improved the performance of the insert stoves, so that they now heat a room almost as well as the freestanding wood stoves do, without taking up the room that the free standing ones do. This new means of installation has meant that you will have a very reliable draft as the liner is set out almost in a straight line up the chimney, though it will have a minor curve to it as it should.

Not only does this kind of installation improve the performance, but it also has made it much easier to maintain and clean. Whereas in the past the inserts were short, and thus had to be removed to clean, now it's an ultra simple matter of removing the cap on the roof, and running a cleaning brush down. If there are any deposits on the firebox, they can be cleaned by simply removing the interior baffle plate wall.