Electric fireplaces don’t produce flames and heat using a real fire. Instead, the flames are typically created through using a combination of lights and rotating mirrors to imitate the look of flickering flames.

Electric fireplaces don’t have a real flame and so the heat must be generated through another means.

As electric fireplaces run on electricity, an electrical heater must be used to provide heat to a room. The most common types of heaters found in electric fireplaces include:

  • Fan forced heater
  • Infrared heater

Many electric fireplaces use the more conventional fan forced heating method to generate heat. In a fan forced electric fireplace, air is sucked in and passes over a heating element before being blown back out into the room.

This type of heater is found in our electric fireplace insert, wall mounted electric fireplace and electric stove.

Electric fireplaces may also use infrared heating technology to generate heat instead of using a fan forced heating system.

Infrared heaters use a quartz tube heater to generate the heat.

As the name suggests, an infrared electric fireplace gives out heat in the form of infrared light.

This type of heater can be found in our electric fireplace log set.

Fan forced electric fireplaces are typically able to heat areas of a home up to 400sqft, while you’ll be able to find that infrared electric fireplaces are generally able to heat rooms up to 1000sqft in area.

Furthermore, you’ll typically be able to feel the heat from an infrared electric fireplace more quickly than from a conventional fan forced electric fireplace when located across the room.

This is because the heat is radiated out into the room, rather than the air itself being warmed up as it passes through a heating element as found in a fan forced electric fireplace heater.

Although you can feel the heat much more quickly with infrared heaters, a downside of using infrared electric fireplaces is that the heat disappears as quickly as it starts.

Heat from an infrared electric fireplace won’t stick around for as long as a fan forced heater because the air itself hasn’t been warmed up as much.

We discuss more about the pros and cons of infrared heaters further in this article.