Fireplaces That Can Heat Your Home and Cook Your Meal
Fireplace designs, energy efficiency and the inner operatings of attractive home cooking and warming ovens.
October/November 1994
By John Vivian
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Remember back in 1970-something when one of the Nixon daughters led a TV tour of the White House in steamy Washington, D.C., and innocently reported that "Daddy likes to turn up the airconditioning and have a fire in the fireplace"? Gasoline prices had just been oil-embargoed through the roof, taking home heating and cooling costs right along with them. For those of us who didn't have taxpayers to foot the bill, that off-the-cuff admission was particularly galling and further alienated the rebellious, draft age, newly environmentally sensitive 'Nam era American youth that I was at the time. Nearly everyone, even our esteemed leader, considered the living room fireplace more a source of entertainment than serious home heat. Well, he learned his lesson.That's an almost forgotten and largely forgiven era. Richard is history. (Along with your squandered youth and mine — right, dear reader?) Besides, with the advent of wood-burning stoves in the late 1700s, the open fire that had warmed and cooked for mankind since the dawn of time was relegated to Boy Scout camp-outs. And the traditional fireplace/flue complex lost its utilitarian value and became a component of design and decor, a fixture in house architecture, an excuse for a mantle and a mirror or painting; it was no longer the home's central source of light, motion, and warmth.
Today, a typical fireplace has a low, deep firebox and large throat (the opening between firebox and flue) and is designed primarily to evacuate smoke, even when the fire is newly started. At a full, roaring blaze it radiates only 10% of the heat energy contained in its fuel out into the room — just enough to give the effect of a cozy, toe-warming fire and take the chill (natural or artificial) off a room. The rest of a fire log's rich concentration of sun-energy is lost up the flue. Along with the smoke goes (fossil fuel heated) room air that must be continually replaced by cold outside air, reducing the heating effectiveness of the fireplace and creating chilly drafts.
Fire in an Open Box
Very early American fireplaces, based on an English model unchanged since the Dark Ages, were primitive and inefficient — little but a hood with a pair of side jambs and a smoke hole located somewhere along the top. The flue damper wasn't invented till Ben Franklin dreamed it up in the mid-1700s. To keep warm air in and keep cold air from streaming down the flue and into the room, a cold fireplace was closed off with a not-very-effective stove board. Many colonial fireplaces consumed 10 or more cords of wood a winter. Householders stayed as warm as they could by bundling up, sitting on benches inside the huge walk-in kitchen fireplace (the "inglenooke" in Chaucerean Middle English), or huddling in front of a small parlor fireplace, benefiting only from the little heat that managed to radiate through the up-roaring draft that was being pulled in from behind them. People roasted in front and froze in back unless they wrapped in blankets or sat in high-backed settees.
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