Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small.
The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace, firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.
It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.
This is why russian-style stoves have a whole labyrinth for the air to blow through, warming up the large brick structure. It can hold heat for a while even after it's done burning.
Even worse, all that exhaust gas that goes up the chimney has to be replaced. And it's replaced by cold air from the outside coming through all the little books and crannies of your house.
There are many different designs that have tried to solve the issue. Both from capturing the heat lost up the chimney and supplying combustion air from outside. They all come with downsides and ultimately forced air heating won out.
The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before going to bed you have a column of brick radiating throughout the night. It’s still pretty chilly in the morning but it works quite well.
Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is why that went away (or so I've heard)
Almost without comment. All I will say is that we have some friends in Germany living in the 'countryside' (as much as that's still a thing in densely populated Germany) that heat their main living area with one of these (way less elaborate design lol). My grandma had one of these sitting in the wall between kitchen (right next to the eating area) and the living room.
My parents have one of these in their holiday house by the sea (essentially an old farmhands dwelling). I can confirm that it heats the house up to blistering temperature even in the coldest winter if one wants. Other friends use a more modern design in their house which essentially heats up the whole house (I don't think they have any other heating except water heating)
The house I grew up in in Scotland did exactly this.
We had fireplace powered central heating -— radiators throughout the house linked to pipes behind the firebox. In the morning I’d wake up to ice on the inside of the windows, and by my teenage years it was my job to head downstairs and light the coal fire first thing in the morning. It worked well once the fire was up and running.
This is a very old problem and there are solutions, like the Franklin stove [1]. However, we don’t really use fireplaces as a primary source of heat anymore. Their use is really more decorative. If they were really intended for heat generation, so one of the other posts mentioned, we would use a completely different design.
Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing for heating water with the minimum required fuel.
My father did that a long time ago in a house that had baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe, ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or not.
In parts of Europe (definitely Germany) heating with water based radiators throughout the house is normal. And that goes from individual houses to big apartment complexes (I lived in a 52 unit one with a central furnace). It's totally normal to let the air out of your radiator from time to time. And they (or you in the individual house case) fill up the water in the 'closed' system from time to time.
Different places, different 'customs' i.e. systems we are used to. All have their pros and cons and sometimes it's just that we don't know that different systems exist.
Radiative heat actually makes you feel significantly warmer, so you can set your heating to a lower temperature and still feel the same warmth compared to airflow heating. This is the reason why floor heating is very efficient, because you have a large heat mass with radiative heat that sits at your feet (which typically get cold first). So it provides the same comfortlevel at significantly lower temperature.
Which is why it is better to make a quick but strong draft in your home than keep window constantly slightly open. With a quick exchange of air, your walls remain warm and continue to radiate heat. Having a window constantly slightly open means air exchange is slow but constant and the area of the wall around the window cools down significantly.
It takes very, very specific conditions (you'd have to go out of your way to minimize radiant heat transfer) for a fireplace to put less heat into a room than it removes with airflow.
Back in the day (i.e. 1700s) everyone heated with fireplaces. And many of them (e.g. 2nd floor ones) weren't that big.
The problem, in my experience (grew up spending significant time in a 3 story country house made of stone with only one fireplace for heating), is that it gets warm close to the fire and whatever is touching the chimney, but the rest of the house gets colder because of the cold air drawn in by the fire. So very likely a net gain, but depending on where you sleep, it could get interesting at night.
The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace, firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.
It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.