All of the strategies listed are ways to improve the heating efficiency of traditional wood fireplaces—the least energy-efficient of all home heating options. Indeed, some estimates suggest that only 10 percent of the heat produced by a fireplace actually goes to warm your home. The rest escapes out the chimney. Quite literally, your energy dollars go up in smoke.

When wood burns in a fireplace, it draws air from inside the house and sends it up the chimney and into the atmosphere. A sizable blaze can consume up to 24,000 cubic feet of air per hour—roughly all of the air contained within a 2,000-square-foot house. Naturally, that air must be replaced. And as you may logically have reasoned, the warm inside air is replaced by cool outside air. Therefore, while your fireplace acts essentially as a space heater for the room it occupies, the rest of your house may actually be getting colder.

One (counterintuitive) way to reduce the amount of cool air moving through your house is to crack open a window near the fireplace. You can also decrease your home’s heat loss by keeping your fireplace doors shut so that less inside air is used for combustion. This will raise the efficiency of your fireplace to 20 percent, and reduce the amount of smoke that enters your home.

If you have an older fireplace, you can reduce pollution and improve heating efficiency (up to 80 percent) by installing a fireplace insert—a metal stove that fits inside traditional open fireplaces. Inserts burn wood more completely and decrease the buildup of flammable creosote deposits in the chimney. Compared with traditional fireplaces, they consume one-third less wood and produce 90 percent less smoke to generate the same amount of heat. Although you’ll lose the crackling sounds and smoky scents you get with a conventional hearth, you’ll likely find that less soot in the air and more green in the wallet are well worth the sacrifice.—Colleen Howell