The Best Electric Fireplaces

Sometimes you just cannot have a real fireplace, or perhaps you just don’t want the hassle of chopping and hauling firewood - not to mention that firewood isn’t readily available everywhere. It’s true that the lumberjack is an iconic and rugged figure and you might well fancy yourself doing the same in order to provide wood for your hearth, but let’s face it - cutting and hauling wood is a pain even if you can easily find it around you. Otherwise you’ll have to hunt around and buy wood, which can be expensive even before you have to haul the stuff. If you’re living in a backwoods cabin in Vermont then it might make sense to build a fireplace or use a wood stove, but if you live in downtown San Francisco then doing the same would both be pretty pointless and impractical. If you go for a real fireplace, then you’ll also have to worry about a screen to keep embers from flying around and setting your house on fire and also keeping the chimney clean for the same reason. There’s nothing like sitting down in front of the fireplace with a nice warm mug of hot cocoa, but then a real fireplace e comes with so much hassle that the alternatives start to seem pretty appealing just because they make things so much simpler.
A gas fireplace might offer you some benefits over a real one in terms of usability, but for one of those you would still need a gas connection and might end up blowing yourself up if you’re not careful. On the other hand, an electric fireplace offers the look and feel of a fireplace without any of the headaches, and without the need to construct a chimney and flue - you can set one up in your home without needing to worry about any of the necessary things being there beforehand. It’s convenient, simple, and since you already have electricity at home anyway it won’t require any additional resources. Since there’s no actual fire involved with an electric fireplace, there’s much less risk of your house going up in flames or your kid falling inside and winding up with serious injuries.

In its most basic sense, an electric fireplace is simply an electric heater designed to look like a wood fire. They’ve gotten a lot better over the years, evolving from the older models which were just some pieces of wood with a lightbulb and a reflector housed inside of a translucent plastic cover meant to resemble coals to today’s electric fireplaces that look and possibly even sound like a real wood fire depending on the features of the particular model you decide to buy. Electric fireplaces have evolved a lot over the years, and so it’s easier than ever to find an electric fireplace that looks just like a real wood fireplace that you can simply install and plug in all within a few hours time.

The vast majority of electric fireplaces on the market today use one of two heating methods - namely, forced fan and infrared quartz systems. In a forced fan system, a fan blows air over heated coils to heat a space. With infrared quartz systems, heat is delivered via invisible infrared light which warms the objects that it touches rather than the air in the room itself. Infrared quartz systems leave more humidity in the air, which makes for a more comfortable environment. Both types will remain cool to the touch except for the area around the heating element, so electric fireplaces are perfectly safe to use around small children as well as pets.
While you might think of an electric fireplace as taking the same shape as a traditional fireplace with a mantle, there’s a lot of variety that you get these days. Some of the more orthodox designs are exactly what you would expect a fireplace to look like, but there are a few modern concepts which will give you the look of a fireplace in somewhat unusual places. The most traditional type of electric fireplace is the fireplace insert, which fits inside of a preexisting fireplace if you already have one that you just don’t want to bother with. If you want the look of a real fireplace but don’t already have one in your home then the freestanding mantle style of electric fireplace is meant for you. There are two variants of the freestanding mantle style: straight edged ones that fit right up against a wall, and corner pieces that are designed to be shoved into a corner of the room instead. There are also electric stove heaters, which provide the heating capabilities of an electric fireplace but are more focused on heating the room than just the aesthetic of a fireplace. Of course you still get the simulated effect of a wood fire, but electric stove heaters give it to you in the form of a small portable box that can heat a room of any size with ease.
A more modern style is the media console electric fireplace, which fits an electric fireplace right into an entertainment console - great for folks who want the look and feel of a fireplace but don’t have the room for both an electric fireplace and an entertainment centre in the same room. Another modern style meant to save space is the wall-mounted electric fireplace, which isn’t much thicker than a wall-mounted flatscreen TV and can add the look and feel of a fireplace to even the most cramped of apartments without compromising space. If you want the look of a fire in a more unorthodox form, then you could always go for the bookshelf style - which houses an electric fireplace in part of a bookshelf, making for an interesting and unusual visual effect that can be quite the novelty.

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This page about Electric Fireplace was composed by V. Tobies and published by Alternative.me.
It was last updated on 2024-04-23 08:02:03 and has been viewed 2469 times.