Pretty sure people just use fireplaces for vibes these days.
Comment on Anyone else notice this??
kurikai@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fireplaces are inefficient and expensive, poolute a hell of a lot, and a lot of effort. Heatpumps are simple effecient and the cheapest to run and maintain.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 day ago
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Fireplaces? Sure. The furnace still gets used for actual heating in the winter. Anyone wanna buy me a ground source heat pump and pay for installation, I’ll rip the furnace out.
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In my country its usually required for new builds to have 2 methods of heating. People usually have gas or heat pumps as primary but almost all of them puts a fireplace as well in the house, so chimneys here are very common.
I also have a fireplace additional to a heat pump, but I would only use it if there was a power outage for multiple days during winter.
So yeah, fireplaces are mainly for the vibes :)
lime@feddit.nu 1 day ago
they’re also able to work completely without electricity and fuel transport (depending on your situation), which is increasingly becoming a concern in some parts of the world.
my optimal setup is an air-to-water heat pump connected in parallel with a wood furnace fitted with a flue gas afterburner, feeding a hot water tank. we already have a big thermal mass in the house so the heat pump would keep the temp stable 99% of the time, but sometimes it gets close to -40 and then it’s good to have massive heating capacity.
CouldntCareBear@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
A heat pump is £10k to buy and install, that ain’t cheap. In fact that would buy me enough wood to heat my house for 50 winters.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Comparing the initial costs of one with the upkeep costs of the other surely is a way to make a bad argument sound more sensible.
CouldntCareBear@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Pretty sure heat pumps have higher maintenance costs as well.
Fire is dirt cheap, that’s why a good chunk of the world still uses it as their principal source of cooking and heating. They’re not doing it for the vibes.
Hear pumps are great, they have many advantages but cost is not one. Hopefully that’ll change.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Not saying it’s for free once set up, that would be silly. I just like fair comparisons. 🙂 I don’t concur though that it’s more expensive though.
Heavily depends where you live of course, but in Western Europe and many other “western” nations wood / lumber has become awfully expensive with no indication of it changing, so newer homes are most likely more financially efficient to use a heatpump (especially if you’re able to also afford a few solar panels). We don’t have to fear week-long outages either (even the extremely unlikely case of a national outage like in Spain is fully resolved within 3 days), so even if you don’t have some solar panels and a small battery to power the pump the likelihood of you ever needing a fire to warm up in a new building (which are well insulated) is absurdly tiny. And those pumps really don’t need a lot of power.
Given costs for lumber and regular professional cleaning and maintenance (again, depending on where you live) I’d assume a fireplace with chimney to be at least equally expensive if not more, at least in countries with no easy access to lumber and proper regulations in place (so most of the “developed” countries, assumably). If you have proper quality studies to prove me otherwise please go ahead, it’s all just opinion so far. The only ones I know are comparisons between either heatpumps and classical heating solutions, or comparisons of CO² emitions.
kurikai@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Deep down you really know that it would only last you like 7 years including the cost of buying and installing a fireplace. Then you gotta pay for a shed/cover to keep the wood dry and storage of it for at least a year.
Emma_Gold_Man@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Nope.
Fireplace is a mistake - it will make most of the house colder. What you want is a wood stove, and a simple metal chimney is much cheaper than the brick one you’re imagining.
Also, a shed isn’t needed - make a round pile (shaker pile or holzhauzen) and shingle it with the bark (or a tarp if you’re lazy). Drying takes 6-9 months, not a year, but I like not to be rushed so I try to keep two piles - one I’m building over the warm months, and when the cold months come I pull from the other that had a year to season.
As for space, they don’t take much. A 6’ tall cylinder with a 5’’ radius holds about 4 cords once the cone on top is taken into account. I find a 4’ radius easier to manage, but that’s closer to 2.5 cords.
kurikai@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That sound like so much effort. I would rather press a button to have the hear come on. And if is too hot. Press a button to turn it off. And also not need any space for a pile of wood
MNByChoice@midwest.social 1 day ago
What does it cost to buy and install a wood burner?
CouldntCareBear@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
£2k. And £50 a year for a chimney sweep.
Emma_Gold_Man@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Unless you’re cheap like me and buy the brush yourself.
jimmux@programming.dev 1 day ago
My family insist on using the fireplace because they have some backward ideas about it being natural and cheaper because there’s so much wood around here. They use it way more than necessary, and use more wood than necessary, so a load runs out very fast and it often gets so hot they have to open the windows.
I like the aesthetic, but it’s a massive waste of time and money. Sourcing wood is expensive. Stacking it takes a lot of time, during which I could be doing productive work.
I’m sure the smoke is affecting our health, too. If I go for an early run on a cold morning the smoke hanging in the air makes it much harder to breath.
I might understand if there wasn’t a very good heat pump right there. The running costs of it are barely noticeable.
tacosanonymous@mander.xyz 1 day ago
100% agree. I love the vibe of a fire place so I definitely have a fake one though.
Montagge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I’ll never live somewhere without a woodstove again. Two weeks without power, and 20F/-6.5C inside the house will change a person lol
Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Woodstoves are nice as an option but I’ll just take backup power any day. Gas pressure is normally still fine for a long time durring most outages and it takes very little power to just run the blower fan on a gas furnace. I’ve run mine off my vans inverter using an extension cord and some farmer grade wiring practices at one point with no issue. Plus I can also power other things with backup power. If it’s an extended outage then most gas furnaces can easily be converted to run on propane and swapping out tanks is much easier than dealing with fueling a woodstove.
Grabthar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As you reach city limits in a lot of cities, it is increasingly likely that you will no longer find gas lines, city water, or sewers. Having a backup heat source is pretty comforting. Much like you, I used to rely on just gas with a generator for backup, but I’ve experienced frozen gas mains, so I like having a woodstove and a couple cords of wood to burn as a backup source of heat. Plus it’s very cozy on damp, cold days, and nicer than the fireplace channel on Christmas.
Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
At least in my area, propane is the goto if you have no city gas hookup. If you want to go oldschool then you have a fuel oil furnace. Keeping enough wood on hand to heat a house over the winter just isn’t practical for most. Even just heating his wood shop just while he is using it my dad can burn through 3 full cords of wood every winter. My grandpa used to heat his trailer house with wood and he often went through 4-5 full cords in the winter.
I 100% agree that wood is cozy but it’s way easier to just keep a tank of propane or fuel oil on hand.
HumanoidTyphoon@quokk.au 1 day ago
Yeah, I thought I was missing something as I was read that and thinking, “ok, fair, but where does the gas come from?”
Montagge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Gas isn’t an option here unfortunately
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
How about not living somewhere where this is even a possibility in the first place. 🥲 2 Weeks, wtf…
I’d also argue for solar panels / a small consumer wind turbine and a battery backup (which can power the heatpump) instead of architecture from the last millenia.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Solar is not great for heating in winter because solar produces very little energy in winter (which is literally the reason why winter is cold in the first place: less solar radiation).
See https://pvgis.com/fr
So even if you have solar, unless your installation is massively oversized you generally don’t have spare every in winter for heating.
Small consumer wind turbines make sense only in limited cases, and I say that as someone who had been building some. Because places with a strong constant wind are limited and generally this is not when houses are built.
See https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
No, what we need is seasonal batteries. A way to store the surplus or solar energy in summer to use it for heating in winter.
Wood is exactly that, solar energy stored in a stable chemical form that is easy to use.
Montagge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
O’d love to have solar, but solar isn’t great here due to lack of sunlight but it still works. Also I don’t have $30k.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Makes sense if you happen to find a building with pre-existing fireplace of course (even though upkeep is still pricey depending on its construction). Face-to-face less though, adding a proper chimney during construction is also pricey and the additional income / cost-savings of PV over its lifetime will very quickly make it way superior in a direct comparison.
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Where’s that? 2 weeks in certain places and millions are dead, essentially precautions are taken at the supplier level.
Evotech@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah it’s good emergency prep