Fireplaces That Can Heat Your Home and Cook Your Meal
(Page 2 of 3)
October/November 1994
By John Vivian
An Earlier Energy Crisis
Ben Franklin knew that inefficient fireplaces made the colonies dependent upon English coal.
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1700 to Present
It wasn't easy to experiment with heating appliance design in the early days. Each fireplace was a permanent installation requiring tons of masonry and a house. An experimental fireplace/flue combination that didn't work had to be torn down and re built... So, change was slow.
Early fireplace builders followed one rule: a small fireplace should be taller than wide, a large one wider than tall. So in colonial homes, you'll find big old walk-in cooking fireplaces filling most of the wall of a kitchen and smaller, high-backed heating fireplaces in other rooms. Fireplaces on second stories were smaller than those down below and used smaller vents into common flues, so as not to overpower first-floor fires that had farther to draw to exit the chimney. Still, each home owner or mason was his own expert; firebox dimensions and flues often followed inefficient, snaking paths through house walls. Fireplace-to-flue-openings and flues themselves were universally larger than efficiency would suggest. With smoke-detaining, rough walls, they had to host one or more chimney sweeps — small boys, for the most part, who were sent climbing up the whole length of the flue plying their brushes.
The fireplace was more than a heating and cooking appliance; it was and remains central to the design of the home. In warm southern climates, chimneys gravitated toward the end walls of the house — culminating in the classic brick double-ender with four flues serving fireplaces at corners or in end walls of the four main rooms on the ground floor and with smaller fireplaces in rooms above. In chilly New England, the farm home was built in stages. First was a one-room cabin with a combination cooking/heating fireplace making up most of one end wall. In step two, a second room — a mirror image of the first — was built with a second fireplace backing up to the first, and exhausted by a second flue. In stage three, a pair of rooms was built behind the first two, heated by warmth radiating from the heat sink formed by the brick of the fireplaces forming their interior walls. Finally, a third large, cooking fireplace with its own flue was added at the rear of the original dual flue and a lean-to summer kitchen addition was built on. A low second story was added, and small upstairs fireplaces were plugged into the original dual flues. Thus appeared the colonial center-chimney saltbox home with its characteristic broken roof line at the rear.
Settlers from Germany brought over the early iron-plate heat exchanger — a four-plate closed box protruding into the room and mortared into a flue located on an outside wall. The fire stove got its air and fuel from outside. The iron radiated heat into the room more effectively than brick, but unlike the English-style open fire, it did not afford a view of the flames or evacuate room air. Farmhouse rooms became stuffy (to put it politely), as many early homes backed onto the winter animal pens and the four-legged occupants contributed their unique body heat and odors to the home.
