When making your home green, there is no reason to do without traditional luxuries, like a fireplace, to warm your home. While most traditional fireplaces are very inefficient and create harmful emissions, modern fireplaces are now being manufactured to burn clean as well as use renewable energy sources.
Flueless fireplaces, which are currently being produced in greater quantity, are not only eco-friendly, but they also give the homeowner more versatility in home design.
Eco-friendly fireplaces, such as the flueless gel fireplaces, are free standing and do not require ventilation like a typical fireplace. These fireplaces utilize an alcohol based bio-gel to ensure they are clean burning and 100% efficient while still giving off the ambient flame of a traditional fireplace. Gel fireplaces come in many different designs.
They are freestanding and can be customized to match any home’s decor. With both traditional and modern designs, they are easy to assemble and are completely portable allowing the homeowner to place the fireplace in any room of the home. Wall-mounted designs are also an option for those with no room for a free standing fireplace.
Another option for an eco-friendly fireplace is manufactured by an Australian company known as EcoSmart. This variety of flueless fireplace burns denatured ethanol, a completely renewable fuel, which burns clean and efficiently.
Many fireplace designs from EcoSmart are very modern and conform easily to today’s home design. The ethanol burning fireplace allows for much more control than the traditional wood burning fireplace. The intensity of the flame can be controlled easily as well as the amount of heat being generated and the amount of ethanol being burned.
For those who would still like to have a traditional fireplace, but are also concerned about the effect this will have on the environment, some companies are creating wood burning fireplaces with catalytic converters.
The pollutants created from burning the wood are destroyed as the combustion gases pass through the catalytic chamber. These types of fireplaces can be as eco-friendly as the other varieties as long as the wood being burned is from a sustainable forest.
Homeowners both in the past and at the present time have believed a fireplace to be a necessity for creating a warm and cozy atmosphere inside the home. Although this belief has not changed, fireplace design has become more modern. There are many options currently available to provide warmth without harming the environment.
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Christine Cooney
Christine has over a decade of experience as a house plan and floor plan expert. Outside of providing her expertise to customers to help them find and build their dream homes, her passion and knowledge of the home building industry allows Christine to guide families and builders through all of the important steps from finding plans to building custom homes that meet the expectations of today’s new home owner. Christine’s years of knowledge of the diverse trends and needs of the modern homeowner has made her into an authoritative and trusted voice in the online house plan community..