Converted ours to a gas insert a couple years ago after a freak ice storm shut everything down leaving us with no heat for nearly a week. We rarely used the fireplace except for dura-logs for ambience. Now at least we will have a (puny) heat source if that happens again.

None of our chimneys are up to code (built almost 100 years ago), so to avoid the annual fire marshal inspection fee for something I can’t legally use, I clogged the top with some insulation foam and sent in the pictures.

I have since started using the chimneys as cable runs, as my “server room” is located in the basement right next to the chimney base. My chimneys are now an integral part of my home network.

We just capped ours. We figured that more heat was escaping than we could ever generate in a fireplace.

Probably a good idea