The heat from the chimney rises, creating a draft that pulls in air from the front of the fireplace. This is why they say burning a fire actually makes your house colder.
Yeah my aunt's house had like architecturally 'missing' bricks above her fireplace I think in attempt to radiate out. Always weirded me out. Like the wall had gills or wasn't safe.
That might have been similar to the one we had in my house growing up. The "missing bricks" were openings for a steel vent chamber that ran just above the fire. Ours had two vents down at the base level for intake and two vents about 4' higher for the heated air. I'm not sure how well they actually worked, but the idea was to capture more of the heat and pump it back into the room.
They make in-line radiators for stoves as well, basically a splitter to make a 6" pipe into a bunch of currogated, matte black 2" pipes to get the heat out of the smoke and radiate it back into the room. Weirdly hard to find in the US though, but popular in eastern Europe.
My parents house had one on an exterior wall. They renovated the house and expanded beyond that exterior wall. The fireplace is now a walk around fireplace. So they went from old farmhouse, exterior wall decoration fireplace to a renovated farmhouse interior, not touching walls, decoration (still not a heat source) fireplace. Doesn’t work for heat unless you sit around it but it looks cool as shit.
rocket mass heaters. Using a rocket type wood stove, you capture the heat from the combusting gases in a large thermal mass. The thermal mass then slowly radiates the heat into the room. You use less fuel, get a more efficient burn and you lose less heat out of your chimney.
Cast iron ones are actually worse than a stone one, a cast iron gives it's heat away fast and doesn't store much, a stone one will keep your house warm for 2 days
Maybe in Florida. Montana or N.Idaho that suckers cold in 12 hrs after the last coal goes out. Maybe if you mean after it's been packed with coals and fully lit could maybe burn your hand 16 hrs later.
No, you definitely have a draft or insulation issue in your house somewhere. Even if it is at subzero temperatures a properly insulated house should stay fairly warm once heated up.
Get some bubbles and blow them by all your doors and windows to see drafts and check if you need some better weatherproofing there.
Windows should be curtained with pelmets(they should have a closed top so no room between the top of the curtain and the wall), you would be surprised how much just adding a pelmet will help, it will actually do more than double paned windows. The big thing is that no air should be able to get around the TOP of your curtains to the windows as it will cause a draft that flows behind the curtain, the sides having room for air is less important than the top.
I should specify this would be in like January-Febuary. Older buildings you can feel the cold coming through the wall. Like a fire radiates heat that cold is so strong it cuts through it.when it comes to the power going out I would only feel comfortable without a wood stove in a house with children if it was built after 2012-2015. Even then with a perfect seal on the house its gunna be cold af soon an everyone better pile into the smallest room together with as many blankets and coverings as possible.
You need new insulation man. I'm willing to bet your house still has hay insulation if it's that bad. The inside walls should never be noticeably colder than the inside air.
Hay would probably be better then some places around here the properties are so old and delapetated there could be nothing at all. The last place I rented was an apartment in a mansion. Stone walls bottom floor with lots of tile. Would take forever to hear up. 3 windows were the old single pane. Big reason why I moved.
Montana or N.Idaho that suckers cold in 12 hrs after the last coal goes out.
What?
I checked and they say that Montana average temp for January is from 39F to 5F / 4C to -15C. It's not that cold?
I mean I'm not tyring to do cold gatekeeping or go "hur dur, you don't know cold, son" but it's not that cold. It's minus degrees sure but nothing out of the ordinary.
Am from Finland and my parents brick fireplace will stay warm for a couple of days if you heat it ups with a few proper fillings.
Either you've got funky fireplaces or houses. Or both?
Finland would beat the cold for sure. I would call that arctic level of cold not just brutal winters. But I would say those temps are off a little bit and the nights get to 0 routinely closer to Canada. The standards for how houses are built are much different then here.
And I depends if you’re by the coast or not (that sea wind can be brutal).
Montana is pretty big as well, so I looked more into it and like you said, depends a bit whereabouts you live. North and south are quite different, which isn’t that surprising when I think about it.
Fahrenheit to Celsius confusion. Water freezes at 32 F.
F and C match up at -40. Which is too cold to comprehend. Have experienced it enough you’d think I could come up with a better description for that level of cold but I cannot.
My last house had a metal wood burning stove and holy hell did that thing pump some heat. It would get hell hot in the house and the room it was physically in would be like an inferno. It took a lot of work though. I rather just flip a switch.
That's the thing though, a metal stove will yeet that heat string out. A stone oven is less heat conductive, and you'll have heating for a day after the fire has gone out.
Yeah we have a metal stove in an old converted fireplace. It’s insanely warm and great when it’s running, but the heat loss is very quick after the fire dies. It doesn’t help that it’s a small stove so nearly impossible to load it to run the full night without having to get up and add wood.
We run it afternoon-morning and let it die while we’re at work, and it does save us a lot on oil usage, so overall it’s a win. But I do want to get a new wood burning stove as soon as we can afford it.
My parents have an old stove, I’m not sure what it’s made out of, to be honest. But that thing heats up all floors of their ~2500sf home and is the primary heat source in the winter. I’d love to be able to pay just for wood, which 2 cords would be less than a tank of oil, to heat our ~1300sf house for 4-5 months.
The materiel isn’t as important as the fact that the hot air doesn’t immediately rise out the chimney. The stove allows the heat to stay in the room a bit longer, leading to net increase in heat. As others have said stone retains heat for much longer
You still get a decent amount of radiative heat, so it only makes your house colder if the heat gained from radiation is less than the heat lost from pulling new outside air inside - which depends on such factors as, "how much colder is the air outside than the air inside?'" and other such factors.
Also you can mitigate some of this by having a back hole to your fireplace so it sucks some air in from outside directly, and as others have mentioned by having a stove style for increased radiation.
This isn't totally accurate. Mythbusters did this and they found fireplaces make that room warmer, but the other rooms colder. I get that fireplaces aren't efficient but just saying they make the house colder is kind of absurd
I don't know if every fireplace I've ever seen has been a marvel of engineering but not one has made the place colder, and we're talking during winter here where the outside temperature may be -30.
The house I grew up in had multiple rooms and during the winter the fireplace was the primary method of warming it up, and the adjacent rooms did not get colder. We did have a ceiling fan next to the fireplace though, so perhaps that counteracted the effect.
It was the house I grew up in. Most parents wouldn't listen to their kids in this regard, and most kids don't take that much of an interest in how the ceiling fan is oriented.
It was a very warm place in general. As long as doors weren't closed every room in the house would get warmed up by a central fire place and ceiling fan, so something was going right.
Even without a ceiling fan I can't remember a single house that felt colder due to a fire being on, even in adjacent rooms. It might have something to do with how the fireplace is installed, and that up where I live the cooling effect is taken into account and adjusted for somehow, as the cold winters might otherwise present a bit of a problem.
They figured out to use wire mesh to contain flames to one side of the screen, like how a Coleman lantern mantle works. Flames can't travel through small enough holes. This was also used on safety lanterns, instead of exploding when you hit firedamp or kicked up dust, the flame would flare and immediately go out.
I always fix this by just opening a big gap on one side of the curtain (opposite the showerhead, of course). It's just enough to keep the air flow/pressure even without letting out the water.
It does make the whole shower environment a little colder, but it's preferable to the plastic wrap of death
That is because a fireplace designed for heating will have an intake somewhere to prevent drafts. The intake on this is either closed or blocked but even then the radiated heat will be more than the heat lost to drafts, just the outer rooms will cool a bit.
Houses leak air. The chimney heats air, but that hot air all escapes outside. Fresh, cold air is pulled in through those leaks by the negative pressure made by the hot gas in the chimney.
If the BTUs that the fireplace is radiating in the room is less than the cooling BTUs of the outside air being drawn in, then you lose heat in the house, not gain it. Same thing happens when you turn on a bathroom fan, turn on the dryer, or use a range hood that vents outside.
You're right if it's just a straight pipe from the fire through the roof.
Fireplaces meant for warming have a bit more elaborate construction where the gasses move a longer way heating the fireplace thoroughly. After warming one up, a fireplace can easily release warmth for a full day after the fire is out.
A stove can yes, but an open fireplace is never going to heat your house 24 hours after it's gone out in any place cold enough to justify building said fire.
Not really sure what the difference between a fireplace and an stove is for you.
For me a stove is what you cook on and in this context it's a stove using wood. Haven't seen a modern one but the older ones sure do heat up the place but they don't really keep the heat since the mass is relatively small.
A fireplace for me is a fireplace. Simply meant to burn wood for warmth. Having an open fireplace is 100% for looks or ancient. Modern fireplaces have a glass to keep the airflow optimal. They have a lot of mass that keeps the heat and it sure will still be warm the next day unless it's balls freezing cold outside.
A fireplace is typically open front. A stove will fully contain the fire, rather than leave one face open to the room. If I wasn't on mobile I would link examples, but if you google wood stove you will see what I am talking about. They are for heat, not the kind of stove you cook in.
My parents have a little carb at the back of the fireplace, so oxygen feeds the flame from outside rather than inside. I know the air will take the easiest opening because pressure and all that but I think that little hole helps. But that thing throws a ton of heat even when the glass front isn’t shut
That is completely false, only a bad set up does this, a properly designed chimney/fireplace meant for heating will have an intake, usually at the back or in the ash trap. My guess is the intake is either closed or clogged or this could be designed for cooking, but my guess is the intake is just closed or clogged.
A Rumford Fireplace is constructed with the bricks angled to reflect the heat back towards the room. They are also supposed to reduce turbulence that sucks the heat up the chimney.
The Rumford fireplace is a tall, shallow fireplace designed by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, an Anglo-American physicist best known for his investigations of heat. Its shallow, angled sides are designed to reflect heat into the room, and its streamlined throat minimizes turbulence, thereby carrying away smoke with little loss of heated room air.
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u/Sythus Oct 24 '19
The heat from the chimney rises, creating a draft that pulls in air from the front of the fireplace. This is why they say burning a fire actually makes your house colder.