Gas Fireplace savings ????

[Grinder]

It's been a while since I was here and I want to thank all of you for talking me out of getting a builders box Lennox for our house.

We went with a Mendota D-30 I believe.

ANYWAY - we have been using the fireplace every night and I'm wondering about energy savings.

Since our thermostat is in the hallway which gets heat from the living room the furnace never turns on in our 1700 foot house when we have the fire place going.

However - how much does the fireplace consume??? It's a new house so we have nothing to compare. Does running the fireplace 3 hours a night use more then heating the entire house with the furnace for 5 or 6 hours??

I know it's vague but any thoughts or comments?

 

[Metal]

I doubt the savings, if any, will be noticeable. The main thing is you are able to keep the one room you are in warmer and it looks pretty. When you kick the furnace back on it will circulate the air in the house and bring it back to temp. I doubt your Mendota is more efficient than your furnace (unless you have a very inefficient furnace, which I doubt in a new house).

 

[webbie]

Not vague at all. First of all, space heat often saves over central heat since you are putting the heat direct into the area where you (often) need it. That works out even better in early and late season when you can probably take the chill off with JUST the fireplace.

At 30,000 BTU (assuming that is the input), you would be using about 1/4 the amount of gas per hour as a typical furnace - with natural gas, this would cost about 50 cents an hour...more or less. Of course, your furnace only runs "x" time out of any hour, so it does not use the full 120,000 BTU (or whatever it is rated)....

Other important things...my bro came home last night and his boiler was broken! Lucky he has a gas fireplace, and it heated the entire house to some degree until the boiler service folks could get there! Same with a loss of electric power - your gas unit should still work.

Hope that gives you some idea of that is happening...

 

[Grinder]

Yea - that's great - I was not look for SAVINGS I was actually wondering if it cost MORE?? I don;t have a clue how much gas either used - my knowledge is "I turn it on, it makes a pretty fire and the room gets toasty to 72 without heating the entire house!

TY

 

[Metal]

It would take some calculating to see how much it costs/saves you. As Web stated, your fireplace runs constantly at a given btu output, so that should be relatively easy to calculate. You could run your furnace and see how many minutes it runs per hour to see how much it costs. I wonder though, if the furnace normally runs ~20 minutes out of an hour, does it run 40 minutes out of an hour while it is ramping the whole house back up to temp after being shut off while the fireplace is running? It is hard to say without doing some investigation. If gas is as cheap as it is here, it probably doesn't matter much. That being said, I only use mine when the power goes out since we don't congregate in that one room much (kids are constantly upstairs/downstairs/on the ceiling/ bouncing off the walls/etc.)

 

[Grinder]

We have an open area - living room/kitchen 17 foot ceilings and use a ceiling fan to bring the warm air back down to humans.

The house has windows on the south side so it's nice and warm every sunny day.

From the sound of it I'm not WASTING money using the fireplace. The rest of the house is cool. The ambient heat from the fireplace heats the hall with the thermostat so it takes a while for that area to cool off.

Even on the cold nights the furnace does not come on at all until we wake up. You can see the charts on the bottom of his web page. Furnace comes on about 4:30 - we tune on the fireplace for about 3 out of 5 hours and turn it off about 10ish.

Furnace turns on again at 5:45ish and then it's off until 4:30. Sun does the rest starting at 10.

(broken link removed)

 

[webbie]

I think you have it right....you are not wasting anything. And you have the comfort, backup and also possible savings in the shoulder season. That is the nice thing about efficient appliances....you don't have to feel bad when you use them (even though they are pretty).

 

[thechimneysweep]

We get this question a lot. You can read a discussion of the different types of heater and the results of one guy's comparison test at (broken link removed to http://www.chimneysweeponline.com/hoinvsfu.htm)