Construction costs are currently skyrocketing

The fireplace itself is already cozy. Heating with logs is not. You only warm the rooms where the fireplace is located at first. It takes time for the heat to get from the living room to the office or the children's room. Even more so if it is not directly adjacent but on the upper floor. Every good hour you have to add wood, open the draft, after 5-10 minutes check that it is burning properly and close it again. And then there's the question of the wood. Wood only gives off heat three times if you are not burning old pallets or buying pre-cut firewood for a lot of money. And your own health is also at risk, there are plenty of people with sawed-off or chopped-off fingers

I apologize in advance for having to intervene again, especially now that the thread has more or less gotten back on track, but..

is total nonsense and therefore I cannot accept it as is. No idea how you get the crazy idea to write such rubbish. Many parents and, as the last pages here show, the majority of the thread participants believe that no spelling awareness is developed during the 1st/2nd grade and fail to recognize the fact that the alphabetical strategy represents a huge step in written language acquisition, the dull "today we learn the letter I, tomorrow M and then read and " is especially very demotivating for high-performing children.

An interesting balancing act. I never get bored anymore, although professionally completely trivial. The challenges lie elsewhere.

We are having a tiled stove installed. Heat pump with photovoltaics is completely unaffordable (and doesn’t work during a power outage) and not available, all other heating methods are crap. Oil, gas, coal. The gas will cost us triple from January. Even pellets increasingly come from abroad. And no one can turn off our stove, we can buy the wood locally from regional forests and store it safely on the property. With a tiled stove, you heat once every 12-24 hours and in our case the ground floor and upper floor (we don’t heat the attic anyway). We haven’t found the ideal heating method so far. Everything requires burning something or generating electricity. Therefore now tiled stove plus solar thermal, with the gas heating as backup and if that breaks down, we’ll see what the market offers then. I don’t find any of the options satisfactory. But I know I need heating. We currently heat to 18 degrees, with sun it’s 19-20. Gas alone is no longer an option for us. We’re investing again in 2023 in further insulation, a new front door etc. plus the stove, that’s already the maximum possible.

So generally, you can say that anyone who says something "against" heating with a fireplace here has never had one in their house/apartment. Because otherwise....

So generally, you can say that anyone who says something "against" heating with a fireplace has never had one in their house/apartment. Otherwise.... For us, this is now the third one and in the new house (new build) we definitely wanted to have one. Even if it means extra work. But IT'S WORTH IT!!

When the fireplace is on, we heat THE WHOLE HOUSE with it. Goes into all rooms,! So the heating stays off!

Heating in a way that is maximally harmful to the environment and climate, which also causes whole residential areas to be exposed to fine dust pollution higher than on main roads, is a bit more difficult.