About Ember & Insert

Scooter M. I am an enthusiast, not an installer and not a lab. I got into electric fireplaces the way most people do: I wanted one room to feel warmer and better on a winter evening, and I found that almost nothing written about them contained a real number. So I started compiling the published specifications, reading the manuals, and doing the arithmetic myself. That is what this site is. No lab coat, no test rig, no units in my garage.

That framing is deliberate and it is the limit of what I will claim. I hold no certifications in this field, I am not an electrician, and I have not spent fifteen years in the hearth trade. What I have done is read a great many manuals and spec sheets and put the numbers where you can check them.

Because the question "what does an electric fireplace actually cost to run" has a precise answer, and almost nobody publishes it correctly. The figures still circulating in this category work out to roughly 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. The real US residential average in June 2026 was 18.34 cents. That is a 53% understatement of the buyer's bill, repeated across the whole category, and it is the kind of thing a person doing the arithmetic notices immediately.

The second reason is the testing claims. The pages ranking for these searches include a cocktails site claiming fifteen years of testing home heating solutions, a cell-biology site headlined "12 Models Tested", and a technology blog claiming three months of testing with smart-plug electricity metering. None publishes a methodology. It seemed worth having one site in this category that says plainly what it did and did not do.

• [Inserts](/inserts) — filling an existing masonry firebox or a framed opening.
• [Mantels and TV stands](/mantels) — consoles and mantel packages, and what the heat does at ankle height.
• [Wall-mount and recessed](/wall-mount) — linear units, and the depth question that decides every install.
• [Heat and running cost](/heat) — the arithmetic, and the ceiling every unit in the category shares.
• [Flame realism](/realism) — the four flame technologies and the exact conditions each one fails in.
• [Calculators](/tools) — running cost at your own rate, and whether a unit will heat your room.

What we do not cover: anything outside the United States. Pricing, voltage and availability are all different elsewhere, and a 120 V analysis is actively wrong for a 240 V market. We also do not do local pages — this is a national publisher with no showroom and no service area.

Affiliate commission. When you buy through a link here, we earn a percentage at no extra cost to you. We are an Amazon Associate. Some links — brand-direct stores for units Amazon does not stock — earn nothing at all, and they are included anyway and labeled as such, because leaving a product out to keep every link commissionable would be exactly the behavior this site criticizes.

No advertiser has ever seen a ranking before publication, no payment has ever been accepted for placement, and no free product has ever been accepted. The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.

If something here is wrong, email info@emberandinsert.com and it gets corrected publicly with the date. Every figure on this site is computed from a shown formula or read from a linked document, which means errors are checkable rather than arguable — and that is the point of building it this way.

The full method is on how we pick, and the standards we hold ourselves to are on the editorial policy.