Patio heaters, fire pits

churchmusicmom
Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:24:25 +0000

My h and I have very recently built a surround for what we consider to be the ideal solution for us. We wanted the look and feel of an outdoor fire pit, but the most logical place for us to really use it would be on our raised wooden deck. That pretty much ruled out wood burning for us (due to spark hazard), and we also eliminated some of the gas-fueled units out there that put out BTU’s in the 50-60,000 range (scary next to our house!). We did a lot of resarch and came up with a little unit called the Firedancer.

It’s a very simple little device designed originally as a portable propane-fuled unit for camping. It can also be purchased with attachments for natural gas (which is what we did). It puts out a reasonable amount of heat, but not too much, and is just right to sit around on cool nights.

We did not want a huge table, so H built a unit to house it (12-sided base and a round tiled top), and I tiled it with tiles we had left over from our kitchen re-do (slate tiles…really pretty!). It looks very nice and is just right for us. They actually sell a table to go with it, but reviews indicate that it is very poorly made and unstable. We built ours from pretty much left over materials, so we were pretty tickled with that!

If you google “firedancer” you will find the canadian website for this company. I highly recommend it for small intimate seating areas. You could even have two different ones and build a surround for them if you are pretty handy. They cost just over $100 each.

Just an FYI, we looked and looked for already built fire-pit tables. Most were too big for our space and cost $1-2,000.