WOOD FIREPLACE INSERT COMPARISON PAGE

A few short years ago, typical airtight inserts dumped 40 - 60 grams of unburned wood particles into the atmosphere every hour. Today, all inserts sold in the US must comply with EPA regulations limiting particulate emissions to 7.5 grams/hour. The inserts we sell are even cleaner burning, with emissions ratings of 4.5 grams or less. To read more about EPA emissions regulations, click here.

Note: Wood fireplace insert EPA emissions ratings don't tell the whole story.

A difference of a fraction of a gram in the emissions rating wouldn't be a good reason to choose one EPA approved insert over another. Great care is taken by the EPA testing laboratories to ensure that each test is as close as possible to the next (for example, identical nailed-together "charges" of pine wood are used in all tests), but uncontrollable factors such as atmospheric conditions can affect the results of a given test burn. To compensate for these minor variances, the final EPA grams/hr rating is derived by averaging several monitored burns. As a result, differences of even a gram or two in the final rating between one model and another are not considered significant (except, of course, by the manufacturer of the model that got the lower rating).