Things are not always as they appear. The Franklin fireplace pictured on the right is a very good source of heat. They will heat up a room much faster than a conventional fireplace. Precautions need to be in place to keep any flammable items at least 30″ away from these fireplaces. Scroll down to see what we found.

Not only is the artificial brick wall on two sides of the fireplace flammable, we also found that the flue for the fireplace was cosmetic only. Factor in that this was an all wood frame structure.

This is a possible scenario had someone started a fire in this fireplace. The room would have completely filled with smoke in less than 15 minutes. The high efficient heat transfer characteristics of this type of fireplace would have (after another 10 minutes) ignited the surrounding flammable materials and the (wooden) structure would be completely engulfed before the firefighters arrived.