This warming, soothing fireplace burns cleanly and smoke-free on your coffee table

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Originally published at: This warming, soothing fireplace burns cleanly and smoke-free on your coffee table | Boing Boing

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I don’t think it comes with fuel, is that right? One might normally use denatured alcohol, but that’s prohibited in California. Even the normal “indoor fireplace fuel” is noticeably absent from Home Depot shelves here. The closest you can have here are gelled fuels, like in a chafing dish. There are indoor fireplaces that accept gelled fuel, but not all of them can. Things like isopropyl alcohol can be very sooty if you decide to try that instead. Make sure you’ve checked the batteries in your carbon-monoxide detector.

I use a kerosene lamp. Which has a glass cover to keep the open flame from immediately lighting all the papers you leave on the table in advertising photographs. I spent around $20 on the lamp and $10 on fuel.

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I’d rather not have open flame in my house when it’s avoidable, so thanks but no. Fire can spread really, really fast.

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Or you could just light a can of Sterno for 1/100 of the price.

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Updated.

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Better have a well-ventilated home, otherwise this is a health disaster waiting to happen.

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I would like to see a video of the flame. Aren’t alcohol flames harder to see than the flame in the ad?

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Yeah, fireplaces are kind of stupid. Not very warm and very dirty, but an air-tight wood stove with secondary combustion and a glass door; that’s hygge.

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Can’t we still get Everclear tho…?

Ah, double checked, we can only get the lower proof one. I guess that when I was in college (at UCDavis), it was either long enough ago that the regulation wasn’t in place, or people were making alcohol runs to NV, which is only a couple of hours away.

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I fire earthenware (pit style) in my fireplace :slight_smile:

Don’t have to explain to neighbors why a fireplace is running in the winter. Might get cops called on me by the neighbor behind me, who is a total tool, if I dug a pit to fire ceramics in in the yard.

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Whenever I see that I think “isn’t this basically napalm?”

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That and cooking on an open flame are the reasons why I would really like to have an open fireplace.

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The product specs list it at 35.5CM, which is under 15", not three feet as the article claims. Y’all slinging stuff you haven’t bought? C’mon now :slight_smile: Main question is though how much are the replacement cannisters, and how long do they last? $90 for a shoebox size fireplace is…ok… but if the fuel lasts two hours but costs $10 a shot, this would be more of a special occasion type deal for those of us on budgets. But what the hell kinda special occasion calls for a 14" fireplace? With what looks like a 6" flame opening? I love Boingboing, have definitely bought stuff from you guys in the past, but I think you best clarify the article on the size error, lest you have a bunch of disappointed buyers.

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Yep, if I start early enough on the ceramics firings, making dinner with a cast iron or wok over coals is really nice.

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But what’s the Carbon Monoxide level like?

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Unlike the gaping hole in your wall you get with a normal fireplace, this one is a compact 3-feet long…

Aren’t most normal fireplaces about three feet long?

Also, the photo makes it look more like one foot long. Which is it?

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As long as it’s pure, should burn to just CO2 and water.

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I suppose that’s why they used a drawing in the ad.

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“warming”?

Needs more thermal mass.
Way more.

Especially on the top plane, to capture and then radiate the heat out.

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Only if it burns with full efficiency, with a well-mixed stoichiometric fuel/air ratio in stable flow.

Which this device plainly doesn’t - a clean-burning device would have a stable, bluish, almost transparent flame with no flickering yellow/orange glow to “simulate all the good feels” of a fireplace.

That flickering orange glow tells you that the combustion is incomplete, likely a fuel-rich mixture, so you will have various carbon compounds in addition to CO2 – which can include goodies like benzene, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde – not to mention the carbon particulates that create that soothing yellow-orange glow. :frowning_face:

But it’s super convenient. /s

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