The Green Fire: The Pellet Fireplace
In the past four hundred thousand years, we’ve come a long way in our relationship with heat. At one time, fire was something our distant ancestors saw only when lightning hit the Earth, but today, we take the fire into our homes, contain it in brick, stone, ceramic, iron or steel, and then reinforce those places with more metal boxes, fitting snugly inside the hearth, and allowing us to not even use the traditional methods of heating, like wood or coal. Instead, we now have everything from the wood, gas, coal, or pellet fireplace.
The truth is that, over the years, we’ve discovered wood smoke can cause many problems for people with health problems, especially among the very young, the pregnant, and those who have problems breathing. Everyone from the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition to the United States Environmental Protection Agency warns about the potential dangers of smoke from a wood fire and those not healthy enough to be near it. Does this mean your family has to give up its fireplace? The answer is no, because there are healthier alternatives, a way to stoke a greener fire, if you will, by installing an insert, particularly a pellet fireplace. By burning wood pellets, which consist of lumber byproducts and sawdust, the burn is much more efficient. There’s so little moisture in these pellets that fewer pollutants get into the air, either inside your home or outside!
How does a pellet fireplace work? It’s a device that inserts into your existing fireplace, and it uses an igniter, which fires up the pellets, and a blower, which fans the fire, and then an augur, which adds more pellets into the flames. Altogether, they eliminate any need to open and close a stove door to feed the fire, thus eliminating the need to allow smoke into your house.