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Many families realize how much daily time is spent on digital devices. This is why a lot of families have gone out of their way to spend some unplugged time together. This is purely family time, filled with various activities and with no phones, tablets, or computers allowed.

The atmosphere surrounding this family time can make a huge difference in the mood of everyone involved. One way to help increase the success of this family time is by introducing a key focal point into the room.

One of the more ideal options is a fireplace. A burning fireplace can provide a relaxing and ambient setting. The fireplace offers a great alternative to a screen and allows everyone to focus on each other rather than something else. When you make the fireplace the centerpiece, you can also choose relaxing family activities to associate with it.

Browse these various activities and see how an ambient fireplace can really make a difference.

Fire features can add functionality, beauty and resale value to your home’s outdoor living space. While most fire features intended for use outside can work for most backyards, choosing the ideal fire feature for your home may optimize the way that you, your family and your guests enjoy it.

In this blog, we compare three common outdoor fire feature options: fireplaces, fire pits and permanent grills.

When it comes to ensuring a cozy environment inside of your home, nothing blends ease and comfort quite as well as a gas fireplace. Compared to their wood burning kin, gas fireplaces are much easier to use, clean and maintain. However, just because these fireplaces are easy to use doesn’t mean that a gas fireplace won’t experience certain problems from time to time.

Unfortunately, many people fail to recognize the signs that something is going wrong with their gas fireplace. This can lead to more significant problems — problems that are both more expensive to have fixed and potentially more dangerous for you and your family.

If you would like to improve your gas fireplace troubleshooting skills, read on. This article will discuss three of the most frequently experienced problems.

You invested a lot of time and money into putting together your outdoor kitchen area, especially the grill. You love to use your grill for big get-togethers and your own specialty entree dishes, but you may not use the grill as much as you want to or thought you would when you bought it.

Knowing the extent of the creativity you can use when selecting food for the grill can help you integrate this piece of equipment more fully into your meal plans. However, it’s also important to know which foods cannot be grilled effectively.

In this blog, we share five foods that are great for grilling and three foods that you should always prepare on your indoor cooktop or in the oven instead.

As summer approaches, you may realize that your son or daughter is about to graduate from high school or college. You may even want to honor his or her achievements by celebrating with family and friends. But you probably don’t want to rent out an expensive venue or spend hours cleaning your house for guests.

Have you considered throwing an outdoor graduation party for your son or daughter? With the weather warming up, the outdoors can be a perfect setting for an upcoming celebration. Follow these steps for a simple yet unforgettable outdoor graduation party.

The best music in the world—according to many who play—is the random music heard around a fire in someone’s backyard. Nothing compares to the real life experience of a crackling outdoor fire and spontaneous live entertainment. The allure of the pairing is so strong, some big music festivals now add “campfire sessions” with the pro musicians to their lineups.

Informal settings encourage the entire group to sing along, keep the beat on a hand drum, or dance to the rhythm of the tunes. Outdoor sing-alongs are both ice-breaking and stress-relieving for all ages.

If you play a portable instrument, having a backyard musical setting is a must. If you don’t play, support the musicians you know (and the ones you want to meet) by creating an outdoor fireside “venue.” The following tips show you how.

The most wonderful aspect of tiny-home living is how easy it is to heat up a small space on a freezing winter day. Start up the gas, pellet, or wood stove, and you have a cozy room in minutes.

Choosing which type of stove to use in your tiny home takes a bit longer. There are important safety and design issues to consider before selecting a final model of heater. Make a checklist of the following requirements to help you choose the heating stove that’s right for your tiny space.

If you have a fire pit or a fireplace out back, you may be looking forward to hot dogs and smores this summer. However, meat and sweets aren’t the only options for outdoor cooking—you can use your fire pit or outdoor fireplace to cook fruits and vegetables too.

If you need a break from the marshmallows, look for something new. For nutritious side dishes, or even main dishes if you want to go vegetarian, try these options this summer.

If you’re joining the shift toward a green lifestyle, your home is the first place you start. You may start using cloth grocery sacks, install a few solar panels, and start your own garden. Many green-minded homeowners might wonder if it’s energy efficient and environmentally friendly to use a gas, pellet, or wood fireplace.

The truth is that utilizing a fireplace in your home can go either way. Here are some tips to keep your merry, warm hearth without significantly increasing your impact on your local environment.

Opt for Closed Fires

Open fires are often not permitted in modern building codes, but for historic homes that have the kitchen hearth still present and stained from over a century of fires, it can be hard to say goodbye. However, it’s best for your house and the planet if you convert your open fire to a more efficient closed one that uses pellets, firewood, or gas.

The open fire draws cool air into the home to feed the flames. You might feel warmer while in the room with the blaze, but other rooms in the house will become colder. If you have a forced air or boiler heating system in addition to the fireplace, the lowered temperature in other rooms will actually cause you to burn more fuel.

An open fire is therefore a lose-lose for green living. You’ll burn more fossil fuel or electricity heating other areas of your house and also burning wood in an inefficient way. The best solution is to install a closed fire that has high efficiency ratings.

So, should you choose gas, pellets, or traditional firewood?

Choose the Right Fuel for Your Area

Whether or not a fuel is right for you completely depends on your local economy and pollution.

Wood

Burning wood in an efficient wood stove provides plenty of heat for a home, but produces smoke. In a rural area with low pollution levels, the minimal smoke from single wood stove will not make much of an impact. It’s also an “electricity-free” option, which is great in emergencies and power-shortages.

Wood fuel is generally acknowledged to be carbon neutral; it doesn’t help the environment, but it doesn’t hurt it either. If you live an area that has few wood-stoves and plenty of moving, fresh air, choose a wood stove with the following guidelines in mind:

• It’s better to source your wood locally. If you buy wood from local providers, it stimulates your local economy.
• It’s always better to burn properly cured and dried wood. Green wood smokes and burns dirtier than dry wood.
• Use your wood stove in place of electric of gas heating whenever possible. This helps keep your choice to burn wood more carbon neutral.
• Use the ashes to enrich the soil in your garden. Ashes give back to the earth by off-setting soil acidity and increasing available potassium.
• Replace an old, non-EPA approved wood stove with a more efficient model. You’ll burn less wood, get more heat, and reduce emissions.

Even though wood stoves produce a little smoke, they are more environmentally friendly than you might initially believe. Wood burning stoves or fireplace inserts can still provide the ambiance of yesteryear with glass doors to show the flickering flames.

Pellets

In a more congested area where pollution is already a problem, it’s better to invest in fuel that produces fewer emissions, simply for the sake of local air quality. Pellet stoves, while still burning organic material, have a high BTU output but lower emissions, making them a good middle-ground for those who prefer a “wood” fire.

Keep in mind that pellet stoves still require electricity, which does still release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, the energy consumption of a pellet stove is less than the consumption of an entire house heated by an electric furnace.

Gas Inserts

If your main goal in including a fireplace in your home is ambiance and an inviting atmosphere, you can’t go wrong with choosing a natural gas or propane insert. Unlike wood stoves that produce smoke, natural gas and propane both burn quite cleanly. They have one of the lowest levels of emissions of all fossil fuels, making them an ideal choice for polluted areas.

That being said, like all fossil fuels, natural gas is not a renewable resource. You will want to research where your local gas is sourced. You can choose to support fuel companies that try to reduce their footprint when extracting natural gas.

Select the Right Size

A fireplace insert or stove that is too small will eat fuel quickly as you try to heat your home. A stove that is too large will also waste fuel—you might burn more than is necessary for your home. It’s best to properly research your heating needs by speaking to a local fireplace specialist.

For more information on choosing a green-friendly stove or fireplace for your home, contact us at Alpine Fireplaces.