Fireplaces, Heating Stoves, Flues and Chimneys - fireplace heating up wall behind too much

OK, I am having a terrible time. My wife and I had a new home built 4 years ago. Among other problems, we now have our fireplace heating up the wall behind it (our bedroom wall) so much that it tripped the outlet circuit breaker for our room. When I discovered why the circuit tripped, I found the outlet in the wall behind the fireplace was so hot that it blistered my finger when I touched it. Needless to say, we removed the fire from the fireplace coal by coal and it took 48 hours for the wall to cool. I had my chimney sweep look at it and he was pretty convinced, we just overheated the firebox since our furnace quit. He looked at the construction of everything visible and thought that the visible construction was such that they would not have skimped behind the firebrick. He did not remove any brick. We built a fire that evening and within 12 hours it was building up significant heat out of the same outlet. I need to understand how a masonry fireplace is constructed so I can speak intelligently with whoever comes to look further into the problem. Please help.

You should have a chimney professional do a level III inspection. Make sure they are at least CSIN certified. You can find more information here.

Chimney Safety Institute of America (http://www.csia.org/)