[asdff]

I know someone who gets through the winter off their fireplace. Really old timber house with riverrock chimney. Their fireplace looks nothing like what you think of a fire place looking. You can’t see the fire, there is like this big iron door in front of it. They go through a huge pile of wood every winter, along with a couple electric heaters for rooms or office.

I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.

[ynac]

There are a bunch of these on our island. The fireplaces are in the middle of the house, small doors, and once they get that brick warm the houses are 80 all winter long. They were built by Russian families in the 1940s, maybe a couple dozen homes on about 300 acres. The rest of the home's construction was typical; except for a few innovative walkways between main house and garage. I'm guessing it's what they knew from their homeland, even though temperatures here rarely drop below 20, and then, only for a short time.

[schiffern]

That sounds really interesting. Which island is that?

There's a whole site dedicated to the (highly efficient) Russian/German stove: https://larsenfamily.com/russian_stove/nojava/index.html

[tylerflick]

I grew up like this. We had special glass plates on the doors so you could see the fire (though this meant cleaning the glass every week).