We are extremely happy with our fireplaces. We heat the cabin only with the fireplace. My wife Terry and I spent last New Year's weekend at the cabin, the wind chill was below zero night and day, and we were quite comfortable. We burn hedge, a very hot burning wood, and we build really big fires when it's cold.
The fireplaces are large and can handle big fires with intense heat. The company is called "Firerock" and can be viewed at
http://www.firerock.us/. Scott found them on the internet and we had a local dealer. Turned out the dealer was an old friend I hadn't seen in years - he and I coached a basketball team together for the 6th and 7th grade years.
The fireplaces came as kits of precast concrete sections. Building the fireplace was pretty easy, you just use the mortar they provide and stack the pieces. Then you have to firebrick the burning chamber. The chimney can be either precast pieces or sheet metal. We used sheet metal and following specs the diameter is quite large. The fireplace needed to have a minimum of one inch airspace to any combustible. The walls on the sides are of combustible material.
They draw great and really put out the heat. Of their several types we bought the Rumford Type and would do exactly the same thing again. Only one regret, on the inside one we chickened out on adding the last stack to make the firebox higher thinking it might look funny. We could get a bit more heat out of it if we had made it full height.
First we did a dry-stack for practice. The firebox is two sections taller than we dry-stacked.
Building the outside fireplace.
A medium size fire. We could have added one more stack to the inside fireplace and then the firebox would have been 8" taller. We built the outside one full height.
