FireplaceIQ exists to answer fireplace questions with real numbers. What things cost, what heats what, what breaks and why, and when to call a pro instead of watching another video. That is the whole mission, and everything on the site is built around it.
Why this site exists
Search for anything fireplace-related and you get three kinds of results. Manufacturer pages that exist to sell you their unit. Contractor sites that exist to collect your phone number. And content mills recycling the same price ranges year after year with a fresh date stamped on top.
None of them answer the question the way a knowledgeable friend would: here is the honest range, here is why your quote might land at the top of it, here is the cheaper option nobody mentions, and here is the part where you genuinely should not cut corners.
That gap is what FireplaceIQ fills. Not the biggest fireplace site, not the prettiest. The one with numbers you can actually plan a budget around.
What we publish
The site is organized into five sections, each built to answer one family of questions:
- Fireplace Costs. Every price guide in one place: installs, inserts, chimney work, repairs, running costs. Each figure carries the year it was checked, and the whole section gets refreshed before every heating season.
- Electric Fireplaces. What a 1,500 watt heater can and cannot do for a room, what the types actually differ in, and what running one does to an electric bill.
- Gas Fireplaces. Inserts against log sets, venting explained in plain terms, the honest read on ventless units, and what goes wrong with pilot lights.
- Wood and Pellet Stoves. The real math of heating with wood, from cords per winter to why a pellet stove goes cold in a power outage.
- Chimney and Venting. The maintenance nobody budgets for and the safety checks that keep a fireplace from becoming a house fire.
Calculators are coming through the fall: a BTU sizing tool, an electric fireplace running cost calculator with state electricity rates, and a side-by-side heating cost comparison across gas, electric, wood, and pellet. A guide can tell you what things cost on average. A calculator tells you what they cost in your house.
How the numbers get made
Every cost figure follows the same rules. It comes from current retailer price sampling, published installer quote data, or government sources like the Energy Information Administration, and it gets cross-checked against at least a second source before it publishes. When a number is a range, we say so. When it is an estimate, we say that too. When we compile a table ourselves, the page notes when the prices were pulled.
Safety content is held to a stricter standard. Anything touching gas, carbon monoxide, venting, or chimney condition gets checked against guidance from the Chimney Safety Institute of America, the National Fire Protection Association, and manufacturer documentation. And where the honest answer is hire a licensed professional, the article says exactly that. Some jobs are not blog post jobs, and pretending otherwise gets people hurt.
The full process, including how corrections work, is on the Editorial Policy page.
What we will not do
- Rank a product higher because it pays a better commission.
- Publish a “2026 guide” that is a 2023 guide with the title changed.
- Pretend a ventless fireplace has no trade-offs, or that a $500 electric unit heats like a gas insert.
- Bury the downside of anything we recommend.
How the site makes money
Display ads and affiliate commissions, disclosed in full on the Affiliate Disclosure page. The short version: some links pay us if you buy, the price you pay never changes, and cost guides and troubleshooting articles carry no affiliate links at all so the advice there has nothing to sell you.
Talk to us
The most useful thing readers send us is real prices: what your chimney sweep charged, what your insert quote came in at, what your install actually cost when the dust settled. Real quotes from real houses make every cost guide sharper. Send yours, along with questions, corrections, or arguments, through the contact page or hello@fireplaceiq.com. If we got something wrong, we would rather fix it than defend it.