Should you put a fireplace in your Central Coast home?

Short answer: I would not, and the reason is not aesthetic. A wood fire is one of the most appealing things you can put in a house, and it is also one of the few design decisions where the romantic option and the evidence point in genuinely opposite directions.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Wood heating feels like the sustainable choice, because the fuel grows back and it is not connected to a gas main. The research does not support that intuition.

What the research actually found

Dorothy Robinson's study, Australian wood heaters currently increase global warming and health costs (2015), is the piece of work that changed my mind on this:

• The emissions rival gas central heating. In Brisbane, Perth and Sydney, wood heater emissions were found to rival the greenhouse impact of gas central heating, even in a house of 160m².
• In colder climates it gets worse. In places like Canberra and Melbourne, a wood heater in the living area plus supplementary heating in the other rooms surpassed the impact of gas or reverse cycle air conditioning.
• The national number is large. The study estimated that moving away from domestic wood heaters could reduce Australia's annual contribution to global warming by around 8.7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, comparable to taking roughly 21 per cent of Australian passenger cars off the road.
• There is a health bill on top. The study put the health costs associated with fine particle (PM2.5) emissions at over $3,800 per wood heater per year.

Those figures are from 2015 and the fuel mix has shifted since, which if anything strengthens the case: as the grid gets cleaner, electric heating gets cleaner with it, and a wood fire does not.

The health side, and why it is not just your business

Wood smoke does not respect your boundary. It contributes to smoke haze, drops air quality across a whole neighbourhood, and the smell lingers. Some people are much more vulnerable to it than others:

• Heart conditions, where exposure raises the risk of complications.
• Breathing conditions such as asthma and COPD, where symptoms reliably worsen.
• Vascular conditions, including high blood pressure.
• Diabetes, where circulation is already compromised.

Infants and young children (developing lungs), frail older people, and smokers are all more sensitive again. On a still winter night in a Central Coast valley, one wood heater is a street's problem, not a household's.

What I recommend instead

Reverse cycle air conditioning, in a house that barely needs it. That is the whole recommendation, and the order matters.

Get the building right first. Orientation, insulation, glazing and draught sealing decide how much heating you need at all, and a well designed house on the Central Coast needs remarkably little. The levers are in passive solar design principles and which way your house should face, and the detail that quietly undoes the rest is thermal bridging. Then heat the small remainder with reverse cycle, which is the cheapest and cleanest option in this climate and runs on electricity you can generate on your own roof.

I do not recommend switching to gas. It is still a fossil fuel burnt inside your home, with its own combustion products and its own reasons to avoid it, and the whole industry is moving off it. Pellet heaters are cleaner than raw wood and better than nothing, but they are still combustion, still need fuel delivered, and still put particles into your street.

If you want to see what an all electric house actually looks like in practice, including what it cost me, that is in my efficient electric home on the Central Coast.

None of this makes the appeal of a fire imaginary. If what you are really after is the gathering point, the glow and the reason to sit down together, a room can be designed to do all three: a low, enclosed seating area, warm light at seated height, and a north facing window that carries the afternoon sun.

This article draws on "Australian Wood Heaters currently increase global warming and health costs" by Dorothy L Robinson (2015) and this Better Health Victoria article on wood fires and breathing problems.