8 Myths About Renting You Should Stop Believing Immediately, 6 Ways Home Buyers Mess Up Getting a Mortgage, 6 Reasons You Should Never Buy or Sell a Home Without an Agent, Difference Between Agent, Broker & REALTOR, Real Estate Agents Reveal the Toughest Home Buyers They’ve Ever Met, The 5 Maintenance Skills All Homeowners Should Know, Click for complete coronavirus coverage from realtor.com, Fireplace Safety Tips to Stay Warm (but Not Get Burned) This Winter, Feeling the Chill? Ventless gas fireplace: $2,000-$3,500. Instead, combustion air for the burner is drawn into the fireplace from the air inside the home, and exhaust fumes also remain inside the home. Because there is no airflow to the outdoors, they do not create the negative pressure problems that can occur with a vented fireplace. Get daily tips and tricks for making your best home. Venting a fireplace is especially complicated in retrofit installations, where it can be problematic to find a route for the chimney flue. Another issue with fireplaces concerns the energy loss. Wood-burning fireplaces are inherently inefficient, since a good deal of the home's heat inevitably escapes up the flue rather than radiating into interior spaces. You don’t need to have an existing fireplace or chimney. By contrast, vented gas fireplaces create a dangerously high amount of combustion exhaust and therefore must be vented to the outdoors. Multi-sided fireplaces are often installed as built-in models between two living spaces. In a traditional vented gas fireplace, there are two vents that run to the outside of the home. Here are the average prices installed, which includes the flue, vent, or chimney. But if you do decide to go ventless, make sure to properly size and install the fireplace and follow the safety measures in your manual carefully. In a process called "perfect combustion," molecules of oxygen combine with methane's carbon and hydrogen to create two harmless byproducts: water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2). Others are ventless; the exhaust enters your indoor space. Now They Regret It. Johnathan C. Brewer II is a licensed general contractor specializing in kitchen, bath remodels, and general construction with two decades of professional experience. "When you have natural gas combustion, you're combining oxygen with methane," explains Allison A. Bailes, who has a doctorate in physics and is the founder of Energy Vanguard, which guides homeowners on healthy, eco-friendly improvements. Direct-vent gas fireplaces require two vents in the back: one that expels gases and another that draws in fresh air from the outside. In other words, low levels of CO coming from a ventless gas fireplace might fly under a detector's radar entirely. We have two fireplaces, and one is a two-sided see-thru one. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the, Sorry, we were unable to share this article. National Association of Certified Home Inspectors, What You Need to Know About Your Wood-Burning Stove and Heater. Fireplace Cost. Also known as unvented or vent-free fireplaces, a ventless gas fireplace operates with natural gas or liquid propane (LP) that flows into a gas burner mounted in the fireplace. But is a ventless gas fireplace safe and effective—and will the flames throw enough heat? Some manufacturers recommend leaving a window cracked open while running operating the fireplace to ensure there is a source of fresh air., NACHI also observes that although fumes are greatly reduced, ventless fireplaces still release small amounts into the home, increasing the risk of carbon monoxide exposure. Because of CO safety concerns, ventless gas fireplaces are banned in California and Canada. Click Follow Search to get alerts on new listings. You can buy a detector that measures down to a single part per million, called a low-level CO detector, for $75 to $150. And gas fireplaces are better for the environment as propane burns cleaner than wood-burning versions. In this study of 30 homes with these particular gas fireplaces, half of the homeowners they observed ran them longer than recommended. California is the only state that outright bans all ventless fireplaces, and there are notable restrictions in Massachusetts. A ventless gas fireplace is one without a chimney or vent—and it's an increasingly popular option for cash-strapped homeowners, since installing a fireplace vent can cost up to $3,000. For these reasons, both wood-burning fireplaces with traditional masonry chimneys and vented gas fireplaces are less prevalent than they once were. This may sound dangerous, but ventless fireplaces are engineered in a manner that minimizes the exhaust fumes. Don't Neglect These 6 Maintenance Tasks—or Else, Debunked! Fireplace installation costs between $100 and $5,600 depending on the type. A special regulator creates a fine mixture of gas and air that burns extremely cleanly, and the units are carefully tested in approved laboratories before they can be sold. When ignited, the flames run through gaps in artificial ceramic fiber logs, giving the illusion of a real wood-burning fireplace. That said, these gas fireplaces do have several safety features that work to prevent potential issues with carbon monoxide. For one, these ventless fireplaces aren't meant to be installed in bedrooms or rooms without ample square footage. So should you install a ventless gas fireplace? Perhaps as a result, 20% of these homes had CO concentrations greater than what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe (9 ppm over eight hours, a recommendation similar to the WHO's). However, ventless fireplaces have neither of the two outdoor vents found in vented units. All of the heat will stay inside your home though, so if that is what you are looking for, ventless logs are a wise choice. So if you were hoping for heat and flames for hours in this space, the ventless pick isn't for you. Special conversion kits (see Accessories tab above) allow you to reconfigure the fireplace itself into single-sided or see-thru variations. Also known as unvented or vent-free fireplaces, a ventless gas fireplace operates with natural gas or liquid propane (LP) that flows into a gas burner mounted in the fireplace. According to Bailes, most home CO detectors are designed to detect high levels of the odorless propane gas, and the probable emission from ventless propane fireplaces is quite low. A two-sided ventless gas fireplace runs from about $1,000 to … Burn Wise is a partnership program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that emphasizes the importance of burning the right wood, the right way, in the right appliance to protect your home, health, and the air we breathe.