Net Zero Afire Electric fireplace Review! (Is It Better Than the Dimplex Opti-Myst)

what’s up guys it’s trevor with emmer’s living this thing looks pretty legit we got a new electric fireplace review um it’s been in the works for quite a while i’m super excited about it i’ve been anxiously awaiting this no it’s not the dimplex ignite bold but it’s something pretty stinking cool i think you guys are gonna like it a lot what’s up with this case man then it came in i need like some snips or something knife me okay got it all right you guys ready it’s like a treasure chest elijah’s head is that what you said [Music] all right let’s open it up and find out what’s inside [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh this is nice look at this just in case extra zip ties never know when you’re gonna need them i wonder what these are for all right so what we have here this is a new brand that is called netfire zero so it’s a new brand that um we’ve been working with them for a while now been in communications with this brand and the whole concept behind net zero fire is to um get away from any sort of use of fossil fuels so they won’t be burning uh natural gas they won’t be burning wood obviously um so this is either all electric they have some cool new biofuel stuff that will be that they’ve launched that we’ll be reviewing as well but this is their electric fireplace they call it the water place water place is what it’s called just me nothing against the product or anything don’t know if i love the name water place but that’s just me so instead of fireplace it’s like a water place get it so you guys know the other fireplaces that we sell that use water are is the dimplex optimist so this is going to be a competitor of the dimplex optimist but supposedly better i’m really anxious to see if it is or not because that’s gonna be the trick is if this guy is actually better or not i do like this big old wooden crate i think that’s definitely handy if you’re gonna um just a lot less chance of shipping damage which is nice all right so we got a media tray here it looks like okay so right off the bat the dimplex optimist has one strip of led lights this has two and there’s a reason for that so right off the bat i noticed a ton of differences out of the box now let’s go over here and look so this is right now the only water fireplace that we sell is the dimplex optimist it’s a huge success it’s one of our absolute best sellers we sell a ton of them so the question is we are going to kind of do a versus video uh the new net zero fireplace or the water place versus the dimplex optimus what are the differences should you really switch to another brand when the tried and true work so well i’m kind of curious myself to find out so let’s uh talk about install options first between the two models break those down so the way the dimplex units work is you can buy them this is a 20-inch model the dimplex you can buy in a 20-inch or 40-inch so this little bar right here is a 40-inch model and they’re cassettes that that’s what they call them as cassettes that you can drop into we built it into the wall an alternative install option is you can buy a complete firebox that they sell with a built-in heater and those dimplexes come in a 40 and a 60 inch now the 60 inch model uses a 40 inch and a 20 inch cassette on the inside and then you have a full glass block box that you can install either as a single sided unit or a see-through unit um one of the things when you’re building in the cassettes by themselves is you need some sort of airflow in the wall so it can pull air uh to the to the fireplace itself all right let’s talk about the differences that you get with net zero net zero is similar in the sense that they have a 20 inch and a 40 inch sort of insert but what’s really cool is they also offer a 60 inch so you don’t have to combine a 40 and a 20 together you can just buy a 60 incher just like the dimplex of how we have this whole line here they can be combined together to create i think up to 20 feet long if you wanted to but what’s really cool with uh the water place is they offer a lot of variation and shown some overlays of this of the boxes themselves so if you do a 60 inch insert your viewing area as your window is actually 72 inch so really you can do a 72 inch fireplace with a 60 inch flame versus their 60 inch box so you get a little bit bigger viewing area so the box goes up to 72 inches instead of 60.

and what’s really cool is you can do see-through peninsula open corner both corners open single-sided so a lot more flexibility on the install options so i think this guy is going to give you a lot more flexibility from an install standpoint which is really cool especially if you’re building them in like this now let’s talk about operation so it does come with its own little transformer it looks like that you can just plug right in uh the instructions did say that if you’re building it in and it’s concealed you’re definitely going to want to outlet to where you can plug that into as well so and the outlet has to be accessible otherwise i think you have to hardwire it or something like that um it does come with the media tray so here we can do crushed glass uh logs things like that we’re gonna get to logs and media options in a minute some really cool stuff with that i know that are super cool but let’s show you the insides here so here’s our control panel we have our on off switch here so there it turns it on we do not have any water in it yet so we’re gonna video that here is our water reservoir what’s really really cool and again this is gonna be different we have three different ways to keep water in here one we can use a funnel and fill this up and i think it’s gonna send water into this section here and then you gotta top it off again so that’s one way now again we are gonna keep comparing this to the dimplex because it’s the first fireplace i’ve seen that’s actually comparable to the optimus so we gotta go back and forth between the two the dimplex again has tanks you’ve seen it in my other videos it has water tanks in here you fill them up pretty much the same way the tank is actually removable instead of like that one then you can take it to like a water softener area or something like that fill it up that way now there’s also a hard plum option looks like here is a water plum option as well so you can hard water or hardline this and again the dimplex is the same way so so far pretty much the same they have a really really cool third feature and i didn’t know i had this but it has a built-in pump to be able to fill this up if you don’t have the ability to hard hard line now why is that important here’s why it’s important for example here’s our optimus setup this is a problem with the optimist is we have a super contemporary ember bed here so we have all this crushed glass and we kind of cleared this out of the way to demonstrate if you needed to refill your tanks the only way to do it is to clear out all the crushed glass and then lift this up and we have it hard watered but you would have to grab your tank out of here then put your media tray back down see i’m having problems make sure your crush glass is out of the way and then put your crushed glass back now i don’t know about you but i’m not doing that there’s no way not happening that’s just annoying you can get four to six hours on an optimus tank they’re saying double check me on this correct autocorrect me if i’m wrong they’re saying 20 hours impressive we’ll see if that’s true or not and then with this pump what you can do is instead of removing your media tray all you have to do is there’s this little tab here so we pop this off you can probably just leave it off but it’s a little stopper then what you do we’re going to test it this way because there’s no water in it so i thought you know what what the heck so comes with this hose you put it here i think you hold this in for five seconds so this will just auto stop when it’s done supposedly so it’s doing something i don’t know what but it’s filling her up so it says it takes about four minutes uh and then it’ll just be full and ready to roll now if this works pretty smoothly absolutely a superior design because we don’t have to take this media tray off it’s not as big of a deal when you have logs like the dimplex logs just lift up really easy because it’s all one piece but if you have any sort of contemporary river rock or anything else on here it’s going to be a problem so this is definitely a superior way to fill the tanks if you’re unable to get water to it and then of course having the ability to not have any vents visible is also another big plus in my opinion so let’s let it fill up and then rock and roll all right the pump stopped seemed like it filled her up so let’s set this aside put a lot of water in here man is that because i told you to yeah that’s what i thought all right we’ve been i’ve been waiting like 10 months to see what this looks like in person i’m so excited all you other fireplace uh junkies out there there’s a ton of you i know it you’re excited too ready here we go now if it’s like the optimist it’s probably going to take a while to get our mist our steam going or our water i want to see if i get the basic orange light going before i tell you all the tricks of the trade here there’s a couple things i’m looking for with the basic flame i want to see how tall our flame gets that’s going to be important that we get a nice tall flame okay so i thought i’d set it up here that way we could see it on a black backdrop just to see how cool it is now there’s two different ways you can control this comes with a handheld remote we also downloaded the app so you have different flame settings those this connected via wi-fi dimplex has no wi-fi so this is really cool this thing’s kind of chintzy so i would just use it on your phone what’s really cool so they have different flame height settings so we can turn it down and then we can turn it all the way up so i’m going to turn it on high that’s on high now what’s really cool too is that they have a speed button what is that oh it’s running without the lights on what the heck that’s kind of cool so let’s say you wanted the humidity in the room you could uh run it with no lights on that’s pretty slick i didn’t even know that existed just found that out so we can change the speed i’m curious myself what that’s gonna do let’s see here is it slowing down like the wispiness of it a little bit oh yeah sure enough i’ll be a son of a gun so initial thoughts flame characteristics it’s definitely more of a wispy type flame i think it’s a similar height to the dimplex but isn’t is that a right word for a wispiness to it it almost looks like a bunch of individual like whereas that’s more like a solid steady state if that makes sense okay so they’re slow i like it on slow let’s let’s go all the way back up to fast oh my goodness that’s a big difference get in the close up there let me get a close-up of that zombie a son of a gun all the way slow show the folks at home you gotta be kidding me i didn’t even know that did that you gotta check this out brother okay so this is a feature i didn’t know existed so you know it’s pretty nice and steady right are you ready lost it yeah you sure yep okay speed wispy okay what do you like you like it slower fast that’s middle higher flame it seems like yeah i think so too it’s interesting because the flame pattern is totally different it’s like more more like is that what you were thinking that’s exact sound that came to him to my mind yeah let me get a tape measure quick so let’s see where am i peeking out at steadily around seven right yeah the top of the wisps are at seven top of the wisps let’s see the a dimplexer taller yeah the top of the whisper there is like nine or ten so a little bit taller man they do look a lot different i almost think the wispiness of this looks a little more realistic though now here is the x factor boom boom boom color on smooth boom boom boom fade let’s try a fade let’s see what that does oh ooh it’s like it’s like green with yellow tips that’s something i did notice is there’s two things of led oh yeah mikey likey i kind of like that one okay let’s try fade two let’s see what this does so far eh so far it looks the same okay so it looks like oh it’s still blinding so this it’s got both that’s what it’s doing so it’s using the orange the orange strip and then the multi-strip in combo with each other that’s pretty slick oh yeah that’s cool i think the flame looks richer with both led lights i bet you because it’s more powerful the fog is there it’s not fog no it’s it’s a mist it’s it’s it’s a mist because it’s not steam it’s not hot no we know it’s not hot we know that i’m just kidding um i’m fine i think the extra led lights make us taller a little bit huh should we see if we gain anything oh yeah we gained something did we gain oh yeah at least an inch i think i kind of like the fade number two in the blue no i don’t i like that oh stop you’re irritating me now okay so i think we kind of went through all the features you know we didn’t try was speeding up the flame with the colors so is it more realistic than the optimist that’s very very subject subjective um i like the wispiness to it but that’s up for you to decide if you think it’s more realistic or not okay one of the advantages to the optimist actually that i don’t see this has is this doesn’t have an audio function so the optimist has that crackling sound that’s not available on this that’s a love hate feature some people like can’t live without the fire crackle it’s like the only reason they’re buying it believe it or not some people are just going to shut it off anyway so again is that an advantage it’s up to the individual user to decide because on what your particular need is the optimist has the audio whereas this guy does not outside of that i’m really digging this thing like i i really didn’t know what to expect i was sort of trained on it a little bit of the benefits of this guy okay so a really cool feature that we haven’t talked about is these guys have a uvc disinfection i’m not a scientist i don’t understand the science behind it all the way but what i do know is that it disinfects and helps keeps bacteria from growing so you’re not gonna have mold issues or anything because this is a high moisture content type unit i will say in the colorado area our colorado air is so dry i haven’t seen mold as an issue on the dimplex optimus but in more humid climates it certainly could be an issue i haven’t seen it come up a ton but the fact that it has that disinfectant beautiful all the more so to to love it okay last thing we want to talk about is media options because we didn’t talk about logs or anything like that this product is still in the process of launching so all the media choices aren’t available for it yet but give you the back story on this guy is uh this pro this product if you’re not familiar with net zero as a brand they are backed or brought to north america by a company called johnson gas or mendota fireplaces you’ve probably seen all my reviews on the gas fireplaces by mendota one of my favorite things about their gas fireplaces is their awesome brick panels and their awesome log sets beautiful attention to detail they’re incorporating those logs and panels those super realistic logs and panels into this water place so as this product launches you’ll see here show them some close-ups on the computer but they’re gonna have awesome logs and media options for this guy i love the integration of the two the reason i do is what you’re gonna start seeing is as these products can electric fireplaces continue to become more popular you’re going to see the the line sort of get blurred between gas and electric it’s already kind of happening even more so just kind of like back in the day you had a wood fireplace and then a gas fireplace looked really fake while gas fireplaces started looking so good that they looked like real wood-burning fireplaces the exact same thing’s happening now with brands like this brands like dimplex brands like modern flames that are coming out with really cool technology where the gap is closing between what happens you used to have a gas fireplace and electrics look very fake these look just like gas fireplaces so you’re starting to see that happening and it’s really really cool for the industry so you’re saying to yourself trevor this thing’s better in every way it’s got better media choices it’s got better ways to fill it it’s got wi-fi it’s got multi-color it’s got speeds it’s got everything what’s the catch there’s one catch it’s expensive so it’s a premium product it has premium features and you’re going to pay a premium price so it is a big jump from the dimplex optimist so that’s again up to you to to really see if it’s if you’re going to justify that sort of price jump it’s not close it’s a significant price price jump now they do make this unit in a more basic unit where you can do it without the multi-colors and just have the orange light and i think it’s defeatured a little bit but even then it’s still more expensive than the optimist so for me if you’re going to consider this as an option go with their platinum burner that’s going to give you these choices again this product is just rolling out we do have some inventory available you can call or text our staff if you want to have inquiries on it now the question is is you probably saw my other video with the dimplex optimist i’ve done a multi-color video they had one working before covid since all the supply chain issues since covid with all the other challenges that they’ve had since then i wouldn’t expect to see the multi-color optimist anytime soon i really don’t think we’ll see that anytime soon so for now if multi-color is something you love and you love the features of this this is by far and away the best water fireplace i’ve seen i think once dimplex does launch the the multi-color it’s going to be more more of an even match but for now this thing is absolutely awesome it’s exceeded my expectations we’re going to be installing it in the wall here so we’ll have a full display on it and we have more videos to come where we’re going to show you the media kits everything like that also i’ve been waiting i knew this was coming i’ve been waiting for this fireplace to do a new top five electric video uh fireplace coming dimplex ignite bold is not coming anytime soon so unfortunately we’re not gonna be able to include that but we are gonna be able to include this bad boy and this is i was waiting to see if it would make my top five or not this is 100 going in my top five no question so this is the water place by net zero fireplace we’ll have it up on the website soon stay tuned for more videos you guys have to subscribe if you’re in the denver colorado area come to our showroom today thanks so much