I have seen some fireplaces in US (I am from Poland) and outside of northern states they are all decorative pieces not designed to heat the home.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
There is a difference between a fireplace and a wood-fueled heater. You have described the latter. No one would ever call what you have shown in those images a 'fireplace' in English. There are wood-fueled heaters but they have mostly been replaced by ones that use composite wood pellets, these are popular for off-grid heating in the US.
That's exactly the point. Here this is the fireplace.
You will find western style "fireplaces" in some new homes which are nothing more than show pieces to have cosy atmosphere but are utterly impractical for the task of heating the home.
Now, what what we would call "heater" is usually placed in the basement for practical purposes. The ones I showed above are placed directly in living area and are way more efficient.
Traditionally, you did not heat entire home, only the area where you live which contracts during winter. There might be other rooms which you only heat in the evening before you go to bed and then it gets extremely cold (but that's fine, you just put good enough featherbed to keep warm). This is practical aspect because heating entire home requires huge amount of resources.
There are plenty of manufacturers making glass fireplace inserts that are designed to be combined with a heat accumulating flue systems. Romotop or Hoxter are examples of fancier ones. The finished stoves typically are specced to retain 50% peak heat output after 12h, 25% after 24h. Combined with automated dampers you just load the firewood, light it and can then basically forget about it as the automation takes care of regulating primary and secondary air and shutting air supply off once the fire is done burning.
Anyway, just as you mentioned, this requires enclosing the fireplace (even if with glass) and it requires that the heat is routed somewhere else rather than directly to chimney.
This is 101 of building a functional fireplace designed to heat the house.
No one in the US builds or uses functional fireplaces to heat the house. We have not done so for over 100 years. Any fireplace you see in the US is a decorative feature designed to look nice and set a 'mood' for a room. There are some off-grid wood-heated homes, and some places will have fireplaces designed to efficiently heat a room or two, but statistically these are so close to 0% as to not exist and in many locations it has become illegal to install wood-burning fireplaces due to the air pollution they cause.
This isn't really true. My parents build a house with a large fireplace in the living room. True enough it actually sucked warm air out of the house (tall chimney) and made the whole house colder.
My folks simply bought a really nice fireplace insert. It works extremely well. These are not uncommon, even in the south, and my parent's place is far from 'off grid'. They absolutely do use it to 'heat the house', and we only supplement with radiant heaters in the far bedrooms.
I think you should visit small town/rural New England. A good part of the population around here heats exclusively with wood but usually with a free standing stove or insert.
I think I went back and forth about adding a footnote to 'no one' to quantify before deciding against it. There are still some left who heat with wood, but only a percent or two. It seems pellet-based units are slowly taking over the biomass-heating niche, but I am sure old guys in flannel with a couple of cords of wood up against the side of the house will never disappear from the northeast.
I think you misunderstood. I don't have anything against fireplace as a completely decorative element. Just don't expect it to perform the function of heating the house.
Where I previously lived (in Switzerland), we had a fireplace/stove very similar to the first picture. A bit similar to this: https://artoffire.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kachelofen-s... On the other side of the wall was the kitchen, and this was where you actually set up the fire, inside an ancient iron cooking stove. Using some kind of a "flap" you could allow the heat from the stove (for cooking) to go to the tiled stove in the living room (for heating).
In my current appartment (also in Switzerland), this is the stove we have: https://imgur.com/a/SVKahw5 We also have an oil based central heating system, so it's not really needed anymore, but on very cold days it allows to get the living room warm and cozy.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
https://images.app.goo.gl/Ka9uiuNTU3LxMHqa6
https://images.app.goo.gl/rWrvoqGxzcJHC5P77
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.