Stuff You Should KnowThey are dirty, harmful to your health, bad for the environment and utterly charming. Wood-burning fireplaces have been with us for centuries and, despite their many drawbacks, are sticking around. Learn more than you thought possible about the fireplace, in this classic episode.
Hey guys, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've chosen our warm and Cozy twenty sixteen episode on Fireplaces, just in time for Christmas. I hope you have your wastle handy or some eggnog or a nice glass of water if that's what suits you, and I'd like you to settle in with a cozy blanket and listen to this crackling episode of Stuff you Should Know. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerome the Jayres. So this is stuff you should Know.
Jerry got a piece of mail the other day that said Jerome. Oh yeah, yeah, like real mail though, right, Jerry. Yeah, I don't know how that happened.
Oh like mail, not like fan mail.
Oh little Jerry just said confirmed.
Weird.
We've been doing a lot of this Jerry translating lately.
Yeah, that's really weird. That's bizarre. I mean, I sold your address to a mailing list, but I've never been reimbursed for it.
So, uh, how are you, sir?
Great?
We are fresh off our live shows in Boston, mass MA and h Washington, DC, and big thanks to everyone that came out. Those were a lot of fun.
Yeah for sure. And thanks to the Brightest Young Things for having us to the Benson Ball with Tig Nataro.
And yeah that it was wonderful we got to meet Tick. She was just as nice and nonplussed as I would have hoped exactly. She didn't make a fuss. No, nor should she. Wait, I mean that in a good way. Wait.
Is it non plus the opposite of what you think it means?
I don't know.
I think non plus means like you're you're agitated, means you're plussed.
Yeah, I'd learned things all the time on this show.
Yeah, me too.
Your favorite part of my job.
And most specifically, the most recent thing I've learned, Chuck, is that fire, the use of fire, the technological application of fire, that's as far as I'm going actually predates humanity. That it was Homo erectus who was the first upright hominid who controlled fire, and it was as long ago as a million years there's evidence of the use the controlled use of fire by humans as as much as a million years ago.
Yeah, it says here in this article that you found that in China there are hears of clay, silt and limestone from like a half a million years ago, and you know signs like you said in Africa over a million years ago that people and these are in caves, so essentially indoor fireplace. Right.
Yeah. But and if you are an anthropologist, you are familiar with the term hearth, but that's usually used to describe something that doesn't really resemble the hearth that we'll talk about today. Usually it was like just a shallow depression. Maybe it did have some limestone or some clay or something else to keep it from catching fire, but nothing like the fireplaces we know of today. The ones we see and say there's a fireplace, they're actually about seven hundred ish years old.
Yeah, And I think the history of the chimney isn't super clear. But by the fourteenth century, and of course Europe, when you had a little dough, you could then afford the nice chimney or maybe just any chimney.
Well, actually, yeah, people started to afford chimneys quite a bit. There was a especially in say jolly old London, there was a lot of chimneys that sprung up.
Yeah, they weren't happy about it.
A lot of problems that arose, as we'll see later on. Yeah, but yeah, it's kind of interesting to see the fireplace hasn't really changed much in like seven hundred years. And then you step back and you're like, no, actually, that's kind of evident when you think about the fireplace and how ridiculously inefficient it is.
Yeah, it's kind of changed. I don't know, it depends what. It depends what your definition have changed.
A hole in the wall with a hole above it that's tall and narrow and leads to the outside.
Yeah, within that there have been a lot of changing.
Sure, Sure, but the overall general design has been relatively unchanged for seven hundred years. It's like toilet paper.
Yeah, they're not as straight as they used to be. Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life. He did about when you know, he was just kind of a person who would look around the world in his everyday surroundings and say, why do people do it like this? That's stupid. I've been Franklin. There's better ways. Listen to me, right, take a peek under my silken robe.
Sure, he very famously wrote that on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
But fireplaces used to get under his skin, apparently because the design, and we're going to talk about this, the traditional fireplace is fairly wasteful.
Oh, tremendously so.
And it can even make your room colder, yes, which is counterintuitive. Yeah, it's like non plussed. Yeah, I look that up. By the way, so non plus I'm correct. The non plus means you're agitated. Well, it means it means that you are surprised and confused to the point that you are unsure how to react. So not necessarily agitating.
Okay, but you're definitely not just like laid back.
No, so tick. Natara was not nonplussed. She was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which is hin. Nice to know that.
Hey, how's it going.
Yeah, she's just chill, right and very sweet.
Yeah.
I didn't expect like some big show trust me from anybody that meets us. Well, no, so I just want to put that out there. I wouldn't want to sound like I was disappointed.
She didn't like throw those snap crackers and start tap dancing.
No, I got exactly what I wanted, which was a very nice lady who gave me a big hug in a photo. I think that's come across. Yeah, I just I'm sensitive to that stuff. Once I started opening my mouth digging that hole. Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean.
Here's a little more rope.
Anyway, let me give you a stat here.
Wait first, I think everyone wants to hear about how you felt when you met tig Nataro.
I was super excited. Can you tell how was she? So here's a little stat for you. The National Association of Homebuilders did a survey, and I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of seventy seven percent of home buyers say, and that's I guess in the US, Yeah, like even in I mean that's accounting for the hot places as well. Sure you know, so I would imagine in the cold places it's probably more like one hundred percent.
Yeah. Well, remember I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about how in New York it's very ghost these days to have a fireplace that you use because it's so waste.
Not does ghosh mean what I think it means now in doubting everything.
It means super laid back and non plus.
Oh so like New Yorkers like, oh, you have a fireplace.
Yes, how not green, right, which I mean they're correct. There's a lot of ungreenness associated with fireplace brownness. Sure, you know, especially as far as like air pollution goes air quality. Yeah, there's a lot of problems. Sure, there's a lot of problems that come out of it. Like for example, I guess if we're going to talk about this for a second, if you are a kid and you have I don't know, respiratory diseases, yeah, you're far likely to be living in a house where your folks burn wood. So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be broad on because smoke's going to get in the room no matter how great the fireplace.
Is, right, Or if you're let's say, if you already have asthma or something, you're not doing yourself any favors right by letting that smoke in the particles particulate matter creep in there.
Yeah. And also I mean like house fires. There's like twenty five thousand house fires in the United States every year that result in like ten people's deaths.
Yeah, from directly from fireplaces.
Yeah yeah. But no matter who you talk to, for the most part, they people say, still worth it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm gonna die of like black lung, and my house may burn down before I get a chance to. But I really love fires in the winter, and I'm willing to take that risk.
So you know my deal or do you?
I don't know.
We live in a house that was built in nineteen thirty five. Oh yeah, yeah, and we're renovating it still forever. And we have the fire place that is not used and it's not able to be used, I know, unless we pay like some pretty good doe to get it retrofitted and the chimney worked on. And I for years have been leaving just little sticky notes and I'll write it in crayon on the bathroom wall and just little things like hey, m how about that fireplace? And she says, quit writing on the walls. We're not getting a fireplace just yet. But maybe you've been there for like ten years. Is when does our life? When do we start living our life? Is my question? With a fireplace, have.
You considered trading something she wants for the fireplace.
It doesn't work like that.
And have you considered begging?
That didn't work either? Oh?
Wow, Yeah, I don't know what to tell you.
Well, I mean, you know, I do I wait until she goes out of town and they just do it yourself. Yeah, but doing a trouble.
Terrible way, so that somebody, a professionalist to come in and go behind you.
Yeah, and then you have no choice. You're like, I gotta get the fireplace guy in here.
Now, there's a giant hole in the wall.
Long story short, though, we still don't have a fireplace. And I'm still despite all the negatives, and I try to lead a green life, but I just I want that wood burning thing. I don't want. We'll talk about the substitutes. But and that's great if you're into that, because they are better in many many ways. Sure, But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. Yeah, I want that particulate matter yelling my lungs.
You and seventy seven percent of us homeowners yeah, so yeah, most people do say, I'm willing to look past the problems for a wood burning fireplace, But like you say, there are there are all there's alternatives right, But we're going to talk about all of it here.
Should we talk about the parts?
Yeah, let's talk about this is. This is when I say like there was very little change to the design over seven hundred years ago.
It's true, man, Yeah, I didn't realize some of these parts existed. So I did learn quite a bit in this. I thought it was pretty much the firebox and the flu that ran up the chimney. Sure, and that's it, right, But there's more to it than that.
Well, yeah, these are I think these are the improvements that came over time.
So you do have that hearth that you mentioned that's going to be built out of something fireproof. You don't want a wood to hearth, so that'd be bad. It's probably rock or brick. And that's where Yeah, that's where you sit and drink your bourbon while you warm your back.
It's like an apron on the floor that extends out from the fireplace.
Yeah, and it can be even with the floor, as is the case now or the one I grew up with. I grew up with one of those mac Daddy huge rock stone fireplaces.
Those ones are like, man.
And you could sit on the thing. They're the best.
They are the best, but they're also like just kid killers. They look like you know, well not if you don't climb in it. Oh okay, which I never did. Yeah, that is pretty nice.
What else you got?
Well, so, you know, like the hearth extends out, but if you look usually up the walls along either side of the hole in the wall, and then above above it, that's called the surround. It's usually made of something either that's the same as the hearth, same material as the hearth, or some other fireproof thing like tile or brick or stone, right, And that's just to basically prevent that fire from licking out of the firebox and setting the house on fire.
So straw no good, no as a material. You have your firebox, that is just what you think it is. That's the square typically, although they are shaped a little differently. Now, that's just where that holds your.
Fire, right, and it's where the smoke starts to collect. Yes, what you're sending this stuff up to behind behind the fire box is actually called the smoke chamber, and there's a there's a transition area in between the firebox, which is where you actually have the fire, and the smoke chamber, which is above and slightly behind it, and there's it's called the throat. It's the opening that that connects those two things. Yeah, and the smoke chamber smoke box I think I've been calling it. It actually connects the firebox to the FLU and it's got some pretty cool stuff going. And this is like where where some improvements were made to the design.
Yeah, and the flu is surrounded by the chimney also again not straw, right, it's gonna be bricked almost always.
In the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf.
Yeah. It's concave.
Yeah, because if you if you look at a fireplace, you just think it just goes straight up.
Right. Well, some of the old designs did well, they were stupid. Yeah, that's how it's changed some.
Right, So if you go if you look at the back of the fireplace, if you could stick your head up into the firebox, you don't want to do that when there's no fire, you don't.
Want to do it. Period.
You'll see that there's actually a shelf.
Yeah there, and it's angled forward too. In front of that. Like I said, it used to be just sort of a cube and it went straight up. Now it's sort of zigzags, yeah, back and forth a little bit its way to the flu that's right.
So the whole point of that shelf and the zigzag is so that when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. Yeah, it's almost basically a protective overhang. And it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff from falling into the firebox too.
Correct that smoke shelf underneath it, you're going to have the damper, and that is that covering that it's movable, and that separates the firebox from the place above it, and that keeps that's you know, when you don't have your fire, that's when you close. We used to say close the flu and we didn't use the word damper in my house.
Yeah.
I don't know why, but that's technically what it is, just the damper and you get your their different mechanisms. But ours had a little little islet circle thing that you would stick. We used our fire poker and we would just unhook it and then close the damper and that when your fire is not burning. You want to keep that thing open when it's burning. Obviously, Well, yeah, you're going to find out really quickly. Yeah, if it's closed.
It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure, you know, and let's got a throat, why not? Sure what else we have? Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the flu Yeah, and you could close too, it's unnecessary, oh you think.
Sure.
But then at the very top of the chimney there's something called spark or restor, which is usually like some sort of mesh grate that will allow like gas and air out, but we'll keep little embers and stuff from going out onto your roof and setting your house on fire.
Yeah, especially like paper tends to float up and out the chimney cap. It serves the same purpose. And that a lot of times is one and the same, Like the chimney cap and the spark arrest are all one piece. A lot a lot of times is that it I haven't heard of this ash dump. That sounds pretty neat though. Sure it's basically I guess, a hatch in the floor where you can just sweep the ashes. I guess that sounds like in the olden days when your house was built on you know, to bricks, and it would just drop into a bucket below, as would your poop. Sure, there were different buckets under your house that collected things.
You wanted to make sure you knew which bucket you were grabbing at any given time. I didn't want a surprise.
And then finally got your little door. It's either you know, glass or metal, or it might just be a screen. We never had in mind growing up. We never had the glass door scene. Sure, just the screen.
We had one of those in my high school house and it was a we had a gas fireplace. Yeah, it was fine, Sure, but I was like, this is not wood.
All right, Well let's take a break and we'll talk about wood after this.
So we're back, Chuck, and we're gonna talk. This would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about basically the physics of how a fireplace works. Yeah, because there are some physics involved. Yeah, pretty impressive ones, if you ask me.
Yeah, I love this article said lighting a fire inside your living room and it kind of hits home of like, how kind of crazy that is?
Right?
And so there are two challenges one not setting your house on fire to keep the smoke from entering the room. Yeah, but yeah, never really thought about it, and everything we just talked about basically was to prevent the first part catching your house on fire, the surround the hearth, all that stuff.
But then if you get a little more into the guts of the fireplace, that's to keep the smoke from filling up in the room. And when you look around your house, you will find that there's a lot of different places for air to get in. And that's actually quite necessary for a fireplace.
It's quite necessary for living and breathing.
Sure, for breathing, it's important for that too, But to keep a fire going in to keep the smoke from going filling up your living room, huh, which again you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your damper open, which I have before. Sure, if you have air coming into your house, then you can keep the air, the smoke from the fire going up the way it's supposed to. And that happens simply because he tends to rise.
Yeah, you know. You know, one of the places I get a nice flow of air and my house is from closed windows.
Oh yeah, you got thin windows.
Yeah, we have it. We've only readone a few of the windows. That's on my like must do list is to get all the windows replaced. Yeah, but it ain't cheap. No, but you're gonna earn that money back, you know, over time with efficiencies. But yeah, I have those old windows, like it can be fully shut and you can stand and your hair will blow right, you know, Like where's this coming from? It's going through the glass. Yeah, it feels like.
It's defying the laws of physics.
It's freezing near my windows.
I remember, you mean I had a house like that and it was I mean the wavy, vaguely wavy kind of windows. Yeah, those were thin.
It's kind of neat though, to think that twenty sixteen and I'm living like a settler basically. Yeah, in parts of my shrining your own butter. So, yeah, you want to talk about the different kinds of heat. Yeah, so you've got conduction, convection, and radiation, and fireplaces use convection and radiation, but not conduction, hopefully not conduction.
No conduction means your house is catching fire.
I means you're literally touching something hot.
Correct, Yeah.
Yeah. But conveection, of course, is when that hot air circulating to cooler areas of your home in this case, and the radiation is just literally feeling that flame warmth.
Yeah, it's in the case of the fireplace, it's infrared and visible light electromagnetic radiation. Basically, there is actually some radio waves in some microwaves produced by a fire, which is kind of cool. Yeah, but for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation and you're seeing visible light rate right, Yes, So when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being emitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection, yeah, big time and yeah, big times, right. Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is moved through a fire, and because you want to keep the smoke out of your house, you're also actually keeping those convection currents from going into your house as well, meaning as Ben Franklin point out, because remember he was a huge complainer that most of the heat from a fire is just purposefully being funneled out of the house up through the flu in the chimney.
I think it drove him nuts a little bit looking through some of these quotes.
Yeah, because he really spent a lot of time like trying to figure out how to make fireplace better. You got to understand though, too, like when he was alive. These weren't just for like charm, No, No, they were to stay alive. Yeah, and the idea that you were wasting all this fuel I think probably part of it also is the inefficiency probably drove him nuts.
Well yeah, I mean he's dead, right, Like, you've got so much heat just going right up the chimney, and not only that when you get that draft, because the fire needs the oxygen, right, So that's another reason it's pulling this air in, But it's also pulling in You've got your thermostat on and your heat going.
Sure, it's pulling.
Some of that warmer air in and up and out as well.
Right, and even air that it's warming through convection, like that's being irradiated out of the fireplace. Yeah, it's being sucked in. And as a result again that when that air is sucked into the fire and has pushed up the flu through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. It's creating what's called a negative pressurization, right, Yes, and that means that air wants to come in and replace the air that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So cold there from outside is being drawn in, which is how like you said before windows, Right, sure, but the fire can actually make your house even colder because it's pushing the warm air out through the fireplace and sucking in cold air from the outside.
Yeah, and it's not it says here, here's a stat that said that a traditional fireplace can draw four to ten times as much air from the room that it needs to actually burn that fire.
Yeah, something like five hundred cubic leaders of air a minute.
Yeah, So compare that to like the smart fireplace aka the woodburning stove.
Aka the TV with the fire burning on it.
Right, I love a woodburning stove. Man, those are great.
Do I've never really been into those. Yeah, I got no problems with them.
It's not a it doesn't. It's not good for every home.
Aren't they incredibly dangerous? Like they get super hot? Right, they're really hot, So like if you fell onto one or something, you'd be in big trouble. Right, Yeah, you don't put the skateboard next to it, okay, the banana peel okay, step one. But and you know you're not going to have like a super modern house with a wood burning stove, Like it's a little more charming in your cabin or something. Actually, I was looking through I think a Popular Mechanics or something. I had different types of stoves with stoves, and there are some that are kind of mod Oh.
Well that's cool. Yeah, so they're trying to bring it into the future. Yes, well, they're remarkably efficient. How much did you say, five hundred.
Five hundred cubic leaders I believe of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace the average fireplace.
And only twenty for a wood burning stove.
Yeah, that's pretty efficient.
So they're super hot, you can cook onto, you can boil your water and do all sorts of things.
Sure you know, s don't touch it. No.
I think the Rendazo's had one in their place in Connecticut. Oh yeah, yeah, and I think it supposedly worked super well, like it'll heat a room and then some yeah you know.
Well, and the reason why is because it's it's like a contained fireplace, but it's not.
Just wide open.
It's out in the open.
Yeah yeah, but I mean you shut the door to it.
Right, You shut the door to it, so you're saving the warm air around it from being sucked in, right, correct. And then it's also removed from the interior of the wall so that it can heat on all sides.
It's right up there, so you can fall on it.
Sure, and then the flu itself can go up and then out of the room so that the hot gas that's being carried out can heat the air in the room around it.
So you've got that stove pipe.
Yeah, you've got a lot of a lot of different ways the air is being warmed in your house by a wood stove.
Yeah, I'm gonna look into these new ones.
There's new ones. There's also like very there's some famous ones that are like mid century design that are super mid sweetish ones, and then there's like there's ones that look kind of like the traditional ones, but they're they're newly built and like they're improved designs.
Remember the old seventies fireplaces that were uh like orange metal that would sit.
On the Swedish one I'm talking about.
Oh really, it's based on that old old seventies.
Look, No, that's the one I'm talking about, is the seventies. Oh okay, Yeah, there's newer ones too, gotcha, But that the iconic orange one. Yeah that's yeah.
Yeah. Like my friend, one friend in high school, Chris Bouten, had the most seventies house is there, right? Oh dude, it was wonderful. Yeah, Like it was the Orange fireplace surround, like built in a terrarium set to deal with plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall, was there. Oh I'm sure there was macrome at some point, but it was just it had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I like those, you know. Yeah, and looking back now like it's super cool, like mod house like people now would be like, oh my god, it's preserved in time. It's the greatest thing ever. Right, Like his hit a water but of course, but one of his walls, his entire wall was like a blown up photograph of like a Hawaiian sunset.
Oh, we had a couple of those in our in our house. Not not a Hawaiian sunset, but we had like a forest with a waterfall going through it, and then in our kitchen a forest mural no no water.
That's very ice storm. Yeah.
I've not seen that movie, but I can imagine because that was seventies, right, seventies.
Yeah, I mean like key parties are happening and people are drinking eggnog around the Orange lacquer to fireplace. It's a wonderful time.
But let's say you have just the regular, regular old fireplace to start.
Yeah, you want to drink.
You come across it, you say, what, what the heck is this thing? What do I do?
Well?
The first thing you do is you log on to the internet and go to how stuff Works and look up how to operate a fireplace? Because how stuff works has you covered? Man?
Yeah, I mean the only thing I could say this would probably be good for is if you've never literally never started a fire. But it seems like common knowledge to me.
Yeah, there's some details in there that I don't know. Like hardwoods, right, you don't want to burn pine or any soft wood. Okay, you want your hardwoods like hickory, ash oak, ye kind of stuff, and you want it seasoned. That's the key.
Yeah. You can't go cut down a tree in your yard and chop it up and burn it the next week because it will smoke and you'll see literally, I mean when I go camping, we get rooked all the time on firewood purchases. Oh yeah, and we sit down for the evening, throw the wood on there, and you just start hearing the sizzle and you see the water just literally boiling out of it, and we're just like, oh man, well, well okay, that roadside guy, I'm going to go back.
Here's here's how you got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch him squirm. Take two logs, yeah, and you knock them together, and what you're looking for is a hollow sound, no thud, hollow sound. Then you know it's season.
Yeah. But he would go like, city boy, you know this is North Georgia, lob lolly pine. You don't know what you're talking about.
You'd say, well, pines of soft food. I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods? I went to college.
Get off my property and leave the boiled peanuts.
You'd say, I'm going to take half of the boiled peanuts for my time.
Yeah. I feel like we always get wet wood. But at least six months you want that wood drying out. They say a full year. What you're looking for is twenty percent moisture level by the time you're burning it. Right.
You could also put in a moisture level, temperature or moisture indicator in the end.
Yeah, there you go that you buy in the big city.
But you're right. You look at the ends of the wood too, and you'll see that it's cracked and split. It's usually dark like gray. It just looked, it looks aged. But the dead giveaway is the hollow thud sound.
Yeah, I'm gonna I didn't know that, so I'm gonna try that.
The hollow thud or I'm sorry, the hollow sound, not the thud. Right, Yeah, that's what you're looking for. So you take your fire, or you take your wood, you put it on your fire grate. Although so this is a component of the fireplace, it's not an actual part of it.
Right.
The fire grade is like this iron stand. It's a great There's really no other way to describe it, although some fire officionados suggest that you should use what are called and irons. Yeah, I like grates, which are well an and iron is basically a great missing the great part in the middle. It's basically these two stands, a pair of stands that go in the fireplace, and it holds the logs.
Aloft, yes, until they burn through.
The grate does the same thing, except it keeps burning like embers on the grid. A little more. The reason why people are like and irons are great is because, however you have it a great or an and iron. You want to keep a bed of embers going, yeah, because that is going to eventually become hot enough that you could throw anything on there and it'll start to catch fire.
Yea.
So when you take your split logs, you put them on your grate or your and irons, put a little kindling beneath them, which is like thinner wood that will catch fire easily. Light it on fire. Oh I forgot first, you want to pour about half a liter of kerosene on this noke sure that it starts.
You do not?
Oh did I misspeak?
That is just a joke. Kids. You don't ever want to use any sort of lighter fluid, first of glass, or anything like that to start an indoor fire.
Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place, so stop right now. Yes, this is for grown ups, that's right. But you do want to use something like, I don't know, newspaper, just a piece of paper to light the kindling. But no, you don't want to use any sort of accelerant.
Well, people don't get newspapers anymore, so you can just light your kindle or your iPad right, throw that in there.
Sure, instead it'll ill start, but that kindeling is gonna catch, and if your wood is seasoned, it'll catch too. And then all of a sudden you got a fire.
Yeah, you may want to adjust that damper a little bit just to keep your air flowed how you want it right.
And then and again when you are when you're when you have a fire going, one of the two main things you're trying to do in addition to not burn down your house is to keep the smoke from coming back in the room. And sometimes that's easier said than done, because every house has something called a neutral pressure plane. Okay, So above the neutral pressure plane, the air is pressurized, so it wants to push air out, and below it air is the The pressure inside the house is lower, so air wants to be sucked in. So as long as you're your fireplace, your chimney above that neutral pressure plane, you're gonna be okay, the air is gonna want to go in. If it so happens that the air around your fireplace is a higher pressure, then the air is actually going to be pushed down the chimney, into the firebox and out into the room, which is no good. But You can solve it pretty easily by just opening a window and allowing air to come in or go out.
Depending or have eight ninety year old windows.
Right where you don't have to worry about it at all to do any because the air just flows through freely.
So if you want to you know, we're talking about how inefficient they are. If you want to improve that efficiency, there are a couple of cool things you can do. One is called a tubular grate, and that is exactly what you think it is. Instead of just a great made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. It looks like sort of like the motorcycle exhaust pipes and things, so you know, it's just there tubular. So it's going to draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes, and then it's going to rise and then loop back around and shoot out the top of the tubes into your room.
Yeah, well it should work in theory, but remember if your fireplace is working properly, it's sucking air from the room into the fire to fuel it and then shooting it out the chimney. So this air that's being warmed could be sucked right back into the fire, that's right. But if you have it so that the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the grate can go out into the room, Bam, you're set.
Oh is that a thing? Yeah, I haven't seen that. There's another thing called a well, this is what when Emily's parents have moved to Georgia now, but when they lived in Ohio, they had one of these recirculators that was a fan. Basically, you would turn on a switch and it would literally blow heat from kind of underneath the grate back out into the room. And it worked really well, but it always seemed to blow a little stink out with it. Stink, you know, fire stink.
Oh okay, yeah.
I mean you couldn't see smoke pouring out of it or anything, but.
It was still affecting your respiratory.
Well, I mean, it didn't affect me so much, but I could tell what it was happening. Like every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has kind of had the same deal. To me. Yeah, whether it's gas only or whatever, it always just seems to have this. But you know, I'm very sensitive to odors anyway, so maybe that has something to do with that, I don't know. Maybe I'm a super smeller, all right, a super smeller.
What do you smell right now?
I smell nol like three three rooms over.
Wow, you are a super smeller because we are hermetically sealed in here.
Not true. And then those glass doors you talked about, it's another way to increase efficiency. But you're also going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much as fifty.
Yeah, there's not a lot that you can do to have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of the fire. For the most part, it's going to lose more heat than it puts out. You just want to hope that you're you can warm your the room you're in right the fire enough so that you don't mind.
Yeah, Or if you're just after the esthetic, then yeah, good for you.
You mean. And I lived in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years.
Yeah.
We were hooked on it, yeah, hooked on its yeah. Oh yeah yeah, and we could get that that room like hot.
Yeah, yeah, you know, toasty.
If you keep a fire going long enough, that's the key. Yeah, you just have to waste more woid than you can imagine.
All right, well we'll take another little quickie break here and we'll come back and talk about some more options and a very depressing history of child labor. All right, Josh, we've been talking about wood a lot, because it's clearly the superior fireplace.
Seriously, but you.
Can you can get the old gas fake log fireplace these days. My mom made the switch. It's fake logs pretty good these days.
So wait a minute, Wait a minute. She had a wood burning fireplace and had a gas insert put in.
Yes, wow, okay, So because she had a like I had growing up to the gas starter, so you would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off, gotcha. So she just retrofitted it. Actually I did it my brother, into full gas with the fake logs. That they look good these days. You know, you can arrange them in yourself in a way that looks aesthetically pleasing.
Right, they don't come in that mound that's shaped to look like three logs laying on top of each other.
No, it's come a long way, I'll say that.
Don't They have beds of embers now too, Yeah, and all that they catch the little flickery glow yep, what is it.
They've come a long way with trying to simulate that.
Look, pika, pika, pika.
I don't know what that is.
It's like the Japanese word for that, like the little tinkling glow. I don't know I'm saying it wrong, but it's a throwback. I said it wrong on some other episode years back.
Oh you talking about pretty pretty?
No, yeah, but that's something different. Yeah, we'll have to go back and find it. They We'll just say this whole part out.
So the gas logs covering the gas vent, you're going to burn that fire behind glass, it's going to give off radiant and convected heat. You're probably gonna have a air not recycler what I call it exchanger air exchanger. They are working as well.
Yeah, And one of the reasons it's so much more efficient is because it doesn't require any air from inside your room. Yeah, it draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less, right, Yeah, So it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to burn. It's just going to say you keep it. I'm gas. I'm super efficient. I love you in ways that wood could never imagine.
Yeah, that's true.
Wood is dirty and bumbling, And why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas.
So if you're getting a new house, you're probably gonna have a gas fireplace. If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably going to be a gas fireplace. Sure that's the direction they're steering you these days. Yeah, oh yeah, I would guess because gas.
I would guess you're you're going to pay significantly more for a wood burning fireplace to be built into your new house than a gas one. You think, yeah, probably just because so I'll bet there's relatively few, especially down below the Mason Dixon line, relatively few builders who know how to put in a wood burning fireplace.
Yeah, you got to find a builder from nineteen seventy.
Three, basically. Yeah, and he's gonna want to give you one of those orange modern jobs that you're like, yeah, this is cool, but no, I want like the real thing.
Yeah, he's like, this is real. So they're very efficient to these gas fireplaces. Sure, the gas burns cleanly. They even have them that are event free. But people also say, you know, what if your house is not like Chucks, and it is actually pretty tight call it and sealed up. Yeah, then they can actually deplete oxygen or moisture can build up. So the jury's still out somewhat on these gas fires.
I say the jury is in. Yeah, and I'm the jury, and I say, event free fireplace is a stupid idea. It's pumping carbon dioxide into your house.
Yeah, that's a that's never good. You would think, Yeah, you can get an ethanol fireplace.
This one seems like Okay, you've seen them before, right, like if you go to a Marriotte courtyard or something like that. Yeah, they'll have like the chair situated around a table with a fireplace in the middle of the table. Uh huh, it's nuts. Yeah, it's just blurting ethanol.
The flame is actually cold.
It's basically like right, it's basically like a sterno fireplace. Yeah, you know if you want to light your fon due pod or something like that from beneath. Yeah, it's the same thing, I think.
Yeah, virtually, and then you can get the woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace.
Well, there's some now where you can get like an entertainment center. Yeah, with like a TV and then beneath it a fake electric fireplace. Yeah, it's cool.
So an electric fireplace has no fire. It is a heater and it you know, it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old in squinting, if you're a squinty four year old, right, but you know, we don't want to yuck someone's youm So if that's your bag, then more power to you. It's just not for me.
I have to take issue though with this article. It says that it's emission free. It's a mission free on the user end, right, still electricity, which means it's producing emissions at the cold fire power plant that's producing that electricity.
Yeah, that is.
Don't be fooled if you're like, oh, it's a mission.
Free Nope, no, oh we're gonna yuck that yum. Safety wise, gotta watch out for those sparks. If you've got carpet around or hardwoods, I reckon.
Yeah, keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace. Yeah, a big one.
Don't put you might want to fire extinguisher, but don't put it in the fireplace, right itself.
Carbon monoxide investing in a carbon monoxide detector is worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like a smart carbon monoxide detector, although get one of those if you want. I'm just saying, if you're using a wood burning fireplace, at the very least get yourself a cheap but decent carbon monoxide detector. Yeah, get smoke Detector's not quite enough.
Yeah, I think you have to have those now. Isn't that the new code?
I don't know. I haven't read the zoning codes in a while. Building codes.
You should take a look. This is one of those kind of once a year things. If you know what you're doing, you can at least get a flashlight and kind of look everything over if there's anything obvious, like if your flute cap is no longer on your chimney hurricane hit. Yeah, if they're big cracks or anything.
So what's wrong with yours? Cracks? Like your house would catch on fire.
All I know is the guy did a lot of like.
Maybe he just wasn't feeling it that day.
No, you didn't put on a good show. He came over because he is in Their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces. So I thought this guy's going to be like, oh great, this is what I do. He acted like he didn't want to do the job right, But that's not a lot of work. Man. You're gonna have to fix your chimney on the inside and it's cracked here. And he got this, and he got that. I was like, yeah, it's that's what you advertised. You fix old situations.
Right, have you? You should bring somebody else out.
Yeah, I didn't like that guy. Yeah, you're gonna bring out someone with some little moxie.
But you do. Even if you think that your fireplace is doing great, it pays to pay somebody to come out and look at it inside.
Like, is it too much to ask for a little energy from your fireplace guy, a little wow factor?
Maybe?
Yes, you're correct. You do need a pro every now and then to come out there. Called chimney sweeps. Yeah, and kreosot is something if you look up creoso cr e soote online, it sort of looks like black lava built up on the inside of your chimney.
Right and it itself could catch fire. Yeah, and you have a chimney fire in which case, and it sounds a little counterintuitive, like, well, there's fire going through it all the time. Fire going through it is much different from fire, like your chimney being on fire itself.
Yeah, that's good.
And if your chimney's on fire, your house can catch fire fairly easy, especially if you have cracks in there, because it goes and all of a sudden some pressure treated two by four, where it's like, oh.
You don't want to burn that pressure treated to by four by the way, as would Yeah. I don't think we mentioned that. One thing you can burn though, which I wouldn't use. But it's a called a chimney sweep log or a creosote log, and it's just a special log. It's sort of like a dura flame. It's a prefab log, it's a chemical log, but it's supposed to break down that creosote.
Yeah, I just I don't know.
Something about that made me my radar went off like I don't know if that's the best way to do things. Yeah, don't have any proof, but I hear chemical log that knocks that creosote loose, and it just didn't sound like the smart approach.
Well, even the the Chimney Safety Institute of America says no, no, like, yeah, those things kind of work, but you want like actual scrubbing of the interior of your chimney, yes, which is what chimney sweeps did.
Yeah.
Man, if you want you want moxie in your chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say, I want to buy your four year old boy and make my chimney sweep slave.
Yeah. I mean earlier we teased and promised the child labor horror show. And that's pretty much what things were like in jolly old England after sixteen sixty six, second September, sorry, fifth September technically. Yeah, the Great Fire of London changed a lot of things, and one of them was chimneys were a little bit narrow and they had a lot more rules as far as how clean you had to keep them. And so, like you said, what you would do is you would can't put an adult up there. No, not really, but you can't put a five year old boy or four.
I think is the youngest I saw them doing.
Yeah, so you would literally buy child from a poor person, right, stick this boy up in there. They were your quote unquote apprentice, which basically was child.
Slave, unpaid child labor zero dollars right, and actually chimney sweeping at the time, So after the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty six. I believe it was mandated by the Queen or Parliament or somebody that everybody needed their chimneys like kept up with. So chimney sweeps became a thing, but they actually swept chimneys free. It was a free service. The way that chimney sweeps made their money was from the soot that they gathered. They would sell it as fertilizer.
Oh authorugh, you're gonna say sponsorships, Like they would show up like their Chevy Tahoe dracket or something.
It is like nothing gets your chimney clean, like son of a gun by stp.
So they would stick these kids in there. Sometimes they would literally light a fire under their butt to make them work faster. The kids would shimmy and distort their body to shimmy in this little eighteen inch wide chimney and ship loose this creosote and soot that would then because they're working above their head, would fall all over them. They would take a bath once a week, maybe once every month, maybe once every two or three months, depending on who you're asking. Yeah, so these children are literally not I mean, if they survived this experience at all. They're not going to live past middle age.
Right, So what you just described was a good day. Yeah, there were all sorts of other horrible maladies that could come about deformation of their skeletons. Because these kids are like four, five, six, eight, ten, twelve years old, they're trying to grow, they're still developing, but they're spending like hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So they're bones, especially the bones in their ankles and knees, tended to grow in a deformed way.
Unbelievable.
There's something the first industrial length cancer ever identified is called chimney sweeps cancer.
Yep.
People call it scrotal carcinoma.
Yeah, where the.
Scrotum was irritated by soot and it would produce warts, and these warts, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually if it was if it wasn't cut out, would the tumor would grow into the testes and then into the abdomen. And it was a very very painful way to die. Kids like twelve years of age were dying of scrotal cancer from this.
Yeah, you get up pre dawn, you work till the nighttime. Hours, three hundred and sixty four days a year. The one day that these kids would get off was May Day, International Labor Day. They would sleep then. You know we said they collected that ash and soot and sold it. They would store all the stuff in sacks and the kids would then sleep in those rooms, still ingesting all this stuff in the air, and quite often they would literally get stuck and die in these chimneys.
Here here's the part where I started to hyperventilate just thinking about this.
From claustrophobia.
Yeah, there's like this thing called positional asphyxia. There's actually a pretty interesting Vice article called like a Brief History of people getting stuck in chimneys, and they actually illustrate how positional asphyxia happens using the Grinch. As he's going down the chimney, his feet start to get above his head and all of a sudden he's stuck. You can't get out of that position. This would happen to real live English boys and American too, apparently, who would get stuck in the chimneys that they were cleaning out and would die there because they would asphixiate their abdomen couldn't take in breaths any longer.
Right.
It happened a lot, and actually, finally it happened enough times that Parliament started to get involved. They first got involved in seventeen eighty eight with the Chimney Sweeps Act and they said, you know what, this is crazy. You guys are buying four year old kid. You can't do that. Chimney sweeps can be no younger than eight.
Yeah.
That was their first stab at reform, right.
Yeah, and obviously this is child labor was a lot different back then as far as how we thought about when kids should work.
Right, but or the idea of childhood hadn't even come about yet.
Yeah, but even so, even for a time where it was believed that children should put forth an effort and work like four and five year old kids, it's just ridiculous.
Sure. Right. They also added though, that if you are a master of a chimney sweep, you have to make sure that they are allowed to go to church on Sundays. That was the other part of the seventeen eighty eight Act. Right. Then in the eighteen forty Act they up the age to twenty one, which was significant, but apparently it wasn't really enforced until eighteen seventy five when this one kid died and he was basically the straw that broke the camel's back for the public.
Yeah. His name was George Brewster, and he worked for a gentleman by the name of William Weyer. And I say gentlemen, what I mean is a scumbag. And he was cleaning a hospital, chimney Fullborn Hospital, and he got stuck and the great efforts were made to rescue him. They actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died and Wires actually found guilty of manslaughter. And his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody, and it became part of the campaign and that was pretty much the end of using kids. You know. He was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England.
In England, I guess in the US they kept using him for a while.
So shameful really.
Now, if you see a chimney sweep tell a four year old to go up in the chimney, you called police because that is illegal these days, no matter where you live. Yeah, okay, let's all agree to that.
Agreed.
You got anything else? No fireplaces? Just in time for the fall.
Well, yeah, it's in November here in Atlanta and in the mid eighties, so right, ready to get that fireplace going?
That's right. If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light and fire, you can go find that out by typing fireplace in the search bart house stuff forks. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call.
This grammar Police. Hey, guys, regular listener for quite some time, I finally become angered or inspired enough to write in about something. I use the sandwich technique proposed by Chuck recently, By the way, and I was listening to an older episode Does a Body Replace Itself? In You guys were talking about emails from the Grammar Police. Grammar only has strict rules to those who decided that it needed strict rules. As a society, we have a rather dramatic ebb and flow of grammar rules. There's no one entity decide to decide upon the rules, and therefore there's no real right or wrong. You can almost consider it like a fashion in a way. We can all generally agree that double negatives are wrong, much like we can all agree that socks and sandals are wrong. And yet some will still use them or wear them without a problem. As long as we can understand each other and the quote incorrect end quote. Grammar does not take away from the meaning of your words, and it should not matter. There are different times in which proper grammar is necessary and scrutinized, and then there are times when it frankly does not matter. There is a huge debate in the grammar world, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivists or descriptivists when it comes to the rules of grammar. It's a constantly evolving topic and arguably grammar is a constantly evolving entity. Just thought i'd share my thoughts in hopes that you wouldn't get down on yourselves from the grammar police. And yes, feel free to pick apart my email for grammar errors. Nice happy face. That is from Colleen Zaker, an English teacher and grammar enthusiasts.
Thanks a lot, Colleen. We appreciate that big time. We always love to hear support from people who are like, don't listen to that. Yeah, yeah, if you want to get in touch of this, like Colleen did, is it Colleen sure? Who cares? Actually I don't know goes either way.
Whatever, yeah, she said, you can call me whatever.
Sure. If you want to get in touch of this, like Cauliflower did, you can tweet to us at s y sk podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at houstuffforks dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, stuff youshould Know dot com.
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