Heat Your Home With A Fireplace Blower

There's nothing quite as charming as the sight, smell, and sound of flames slowly consuming a wood log in a fireplace. Yes, wood burning fireplaces are controversial these days because they emit particulates and smoke into the environment, but they remain popular in part because wood is a sustainable fuel that can be regrown for harvest.

Inefficiencies Of The Fireplace

The only problem with using a wood burning fireplace – or a gas burning fireplace, for that matter – to heat a home is its inefficiency. Without a fireplace blower, all the heat from a fireplace stays right in front of the firebox opening. Unless you are standing directly in front of a fireplace, you may not feel the heat at all.

How A Fireplace Blower Can Help

A fireplace blower will move the air around the room like a fan. A fireplace blower sucks in unheated air and takes the warm, heated air from your fireplace and propels the air outward, further into the room than would otherwise be possible by radiant heat alone.

If you want to gain the maximum efficiency from the wood or gas that you burn in your fireplace, a fireplace blower is essential.

Installing A Fireplace Blower

Installing a fireplace blower insert in your fireplace can be easy and inexpensive if the builder of your home, or some previous owner, wired the fireplace unit for electric power. If electricity is already available, the process of installation will be relatively simple.

However, if power is not already available for your unit, you will need to have wiring done by an electrician before a fireplace blower can be installed.

Blower – Grate Combinations

One popular and space-saving configuration for a fireplace blower is to combine the blower and the fireplace grate. The grate is made up of a series of hollow pipes bent to form a "U" shape. The back of the U is placed against the back of the fireplace, with the arms of the U facing into the room. Wood is placed inside the U and lit, and as it burns, the metal of the U heats up. When the metal gets hot, the blower is switched on. Hot air flows through the pipes and is blown out the ends of the "U" by an electric motor.

Early versions of these blower-grate combinations were wired for AC power, with a cord that could be plugged into a wall outlet near the fireplace. If you can find one of these units at a vintage store or thrift store, consider yourself lucky indeed.