Fancy is subjective, but I wouldn't call a burner whose air is fed from the inside fancy. Even if you have a good chimney, but your burner interfaces with the inside air, presuming the house is relatively air-tight (built in the last 15 years), you'll get smoke inside when you use it, especially while the chimney is cold, because there won't be enough draft to pull the smoke out of the house. Where I am it is forbidden to have such burners in a new construction.

> I don't understand the appeal at all.

Renewable energy, one of the cheapest source of heat kwh/$, doesn't require electricity to function, cheap to buy/install if the place was designed for it, &c. I'm building right now and my main heater will be a wood stove.

If the air stinks both inside and outside of his house I would assume he's doing something wrong, even my cheap cottage fireplace insert from the 80s doesn't smoke the inside of my house.

Poorly dried wood?

We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.

But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.

> I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

Do you want cheap and efficient, or do you want locally built?

Very expensive. If you want to invest, first step would be making inefficient houses efficient, aka insulation. Problem is that, a lot of older housing ventilation is built on it being leaky...

The city of Szeged in Hungary did this recently. You can find some numbers from there.