heating appliances

There are some outdoor fireplace options that are more substantial and some that are more sparse. In both cases, you can enjoy them for many months depending on your climate. There is something special about the feeling that a warming fire on the patio does for us. You can find styles that are suitable for moving around your patio space or others that are more semi-permanent models.

For one of the more popular outdoor patio fireplace choices – those metal bowls with the stands and mesh screen covers – you will find them priced from the $75 – 200 USD range. These are easy to put together and simple to move. For a larger fireplace unit, you will be looking at prices in the range of $750 – 1,500 USD. These come in movable styles as well as units that are meant to stay put.

If these portable or large fireplace units are not what you had in mind, consider another option. There is always the standard in-ground fire pit. While not as flexible of an arrangement, this style can give you a great place to gather and even cook on if you wish. Then, on a smaller scale, there are fire pit tables that can double as places for icing drinks when no fire is burning.

Before you purchase the fireplace you decide looks good, make sure you read some reviews if you’re shopping online. The quality of the unit is often hard to assess from the pictures provided by the manufacturer. In some cases, the inferior quality items will be too thin and will warp, crack or otherwise breakdown with consistent use. Since you probably plan on enjoying your patio for years to come, you’ll want to avoid this issue.

It also depends on what use you intend to derive from your fireplace or fire pit. If heat is the primary goal, then look into buying a patio heater instead. Or, if not to replace your patio fireplace, at least as an addition to it as it will provide you more consistent heat and an easier user experience and functionality than a fire pit.

With the change in law in countries like the U.K. that require smokers to go outside of bars and restaurants to smoke many establishments now offer patio heaters. These may not be just for the smokers as they have other advantages as far as bars are concerned. Using patio heaters means they can offer an amenable outside venue that otherwise may be too cold. This has the effect of both extending the evenings outside as well as potentially the seasons, or at least weeks and months, that customers can spend time happily outdoors. So as far as paying customers are concerned, patio heaters offer them good news as far as enjoying a night out is concerned.

However there is a potential down side to outdoor patio heaters that their increasing popularity is beginning to produce. The fact of the matter is that heat produced in an outdoor setting is lost very quickly to the outside air. This means that for patio heaters to actually have a beneficial effect as far as keeping us warm, they have to pump out fairly high levels of heat. This only becomes something to worry about when we realise the environmental damage that this sort of heating can be responsible for. Obviously some people believe that global warming is simply a myth while others realise the seriousness of the situation. Then there are others who are aware of the situation but choose not to concern themselves with it.

So the question is, should we use patio heaters? The answer to this really comes down to a personal decision. The use of one patio heater is unlikely to have a noticeable environmental impact however thousands or maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of patio heaters all combined will have a substantial impact on our world.

Patio heaters burn liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or propane. So the good thing here is that this means they are more efficient, as far as the environment is concerned, than electrical devices. By this I mean that the amount of carbon they release into the atmosphere is less than if electrical patio heaters were used. Of course there are infra-red patio heaters that are powered by electricity. Even though there is no burning in the heater, this style is actually more harmful for the environment because the electricity produced in power stations, particularly coal burning power stations, releases substantial quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. Obviously nuclear power would be different but that carries its own inherent risks.

Patio heaters are useful heating appliances but we should remember that there is an environmental impact to their use.