SEI Furniture Highgate Electric Fireplace with Hidden Media Shelf, New Whiskey Maple with Faux Granite

Well-packaged, solid piece. No cardboard. I assembled it with minimal assistance. I’d give the instruction book a C- for poor image description, but most of the assembly is fool-proof.Screws attaching to finished surfaces were a little harder to attach, because finish tends to fill pre-drilled holes. That is to be expected with furniture assembly.Assembled, it is a great addition to my den, and puts off substantial heat for that room.UPDATE: Yesterday we had an electrical issue with the Firebox, and it lost power. I called and left a message with SEI (after hours). I got a return call first thing this morning apologizing for our inconvenience, and letting us know they were shipping a replacement today. I just received notification from FedEx that it will arrive tomorrow. This is so far above and beyond my expectations with customer service these days, and I am at a loss for words.You really know the measure of quality of an organization in the way they handle product failure. They stand behind the products. Enough said.

This fireplace is a nice addition to my living room, adding a bit of warmth and ambiance, and it was the right size for my space. I was able to put it together without too much difficulty. The firebox blower does put out some heat, although on cold winter days I wish it was a bit more. The media shelf cover does not roll in and out smoothly, but with a bit of effort it does open and close completely.If you don't have the luxury of a wood or gas fireplace, this is the next best thing.

Any time you're evaluating a product like this, you have a take a few things into consideration: price; quality; durability and ease of assembly/instructions. IMO, this "faux" fireplace covers them all. There are certainly *less expensive* pieces out there, but none that I've seen that are built as well as this one ... the quality and combination of woods/materials used is top notch for the price range. The assembly sequence is very well-engineered; pieces all went together perfectly for me; the hardware is very well packaged, sealed into separate packets within one large plastic bag and clearly labeled. The instructions are good, and fairly easy to follow if you take your time. When completed, the structure is VERY sturdy and solid ... we temporarily sat our 65" LED TV on top of it (probably about 70 lbs with the stand), and it held up fine, but we took it off once I was able to mount the TV on the wall above/behind the mantel, because I didn't want to have to deal with anchoring the whole thing to the wall to stabilize it, and didn't want to take any chance that the weight of the TV would end up causing the fireplace top/mantel to bow under the weight of the TV.I saw one reviewer complain that the piece is "junk," because it relies on a lot of "cam" type fasteners. IMO, cam fasteners are essential to products like this, and work fine IF you know how to use them correctly ... single most important rule is this: make sure the anchor pin is screwed in far enough so that no part of the base stop remains above the plane of the mating surface, but no lower than that. That way, you'll always get to maximum tension on the cam nut, without ending up with a loose fit at the end of the cam transit, or breaking the nut because you sunk the anchor pin too deep when you screwed it in.My one critique regards the firebox ... the heater sucks a lot of electricity for a very limited heating capability (requires a 16-amp minimum outlet), and it's controlled by a thermostat, so unless you manually turn it off, I'm guessing that it will just run and run and never get most rooms much warmer at all. I'll use it from time to time, I guess, but we won't be relying on this gizmo to heat the fairly large room it's in. The flame features are pretty cool (both the logs and flame brightness are separately adjustable), but the flame pattern seems a bit redundant. It'd be nicer, and look more "natural" if the flame pattern was controlled by a more broadly random system/algorithm, but I don't consider either of those complaints worthy of taking a star away from the manufacturer. For the price, I consider this faux fireplace an excellent value. Five stars.

We recently enclosed our back deck to turn it into a 3 season room. We bought this both to function as a chill chaser during cooler weather and to provide ambiance. We are pleased with our purchase. The flames and log/ember glow can be adjusted separately, and look very reasonably realistic. We like that the flames can be turned on for ambiance without also turning on the heat.The heater is about as we expected... basically the same as any typical ~$40 or so space heater both in heat output and fan noise. The fan is quiet enough that you can't hear it at all if there is any other sound/activity going on in the room, but you would hear it in a bedroom at night when it gets quiet enough to hear a pin drop. The heat output is not sufficient to be the sole or primary source of heat for anything more than a tiny space, but is excellent to provide a little supplemental heat to a room.Even though it is typical cheap construction as expected at this price point (laminated MDF panels that connect with pegs & cam twist locks), the finished product looks very nice. All the holes were correctly positioned so that everything lined up square and connected w/o leaving noticeable seams. Some of the dowel holes were drilled slightly oversized, meaning the wooden dowels were loose in some of the holes, but I always assemble this type of furniture using wood glue on the dowels anyway. Tip on moving this type of furniture: Pick it up, carry it to the new location, and set it straight down, or alternatively use furniture dollies with wheels... do not try to slide or "scoot" it across the floor while it is resting on the floor. This will help keep your furniture sturdier.The hardware package included a few extra screws, dowels, cam locks/pegs, and a needed allen wrench. All you need to supply is a screwdriver and some wood glue to put on the dowels. The assembly instructions don't state to use glue on the dowels, but it's common practice and I recommend it, especially since a few holes were slightly too big... plus the cam lock pegs are easy to strip when screwing into the soft wood, so gluing the dowels helps to take some of the stress off of those.The assembly instructions were very detailed step-by-step in picture format, with all parts labeled correctly to correspond to the pictures. The only construction is the wooden surround. The firebox comes complete assembled, ready to plug into a wall outlet. Once you assemble the surround, the firebox simply rests in the surround hole, and is held in place by 4 wood screws.Bottom line is we would definitely buy this again if we had it to do over.