On 12/1/2012 7:53 AM, Edgar Owen wrote:
I'm surprised you don't have a wood stove instead of a fireplace with a blower.
We live in a poorly designed faux-chalet that was built by the previous owner, and have just made-do all these years as first we hung on working in a hard-scrabble poverty-pocket while we raised a family and then did other things (than build a new house) that were more important to us, transforming the place into a subsistence homestead and investing what money we could spare to create a retirement fund. Most of the space in the house is in a story and a half "great room" dominated by a massive fire place and nowhere in that cavern with its uninsulated ceiling would a heat-stove 'fit', nor would it be a thermodynamic improvement to use a heat-stove with the chimney as a flue, thereby losing the fireplace. You also under-estimate the effectiveness of our custom built hollow grate and the substantial furnace-blower that drives air through the eight pipes that cradle the fire (passing under and over the fire) and exhaust into the room. While it is true that we lose some heat up the chimney, its massive masonry also captures and re-radiates a lot of that, while the ox-roasting fire that we build with more than three-foot logs is putting out more BTUs/time than any efficient (air-tight) stove would produce. Finally, we just like an open fire, and the wood is both free and otherwise going to waste, as most of the place is forested, and we are always doing things that create potential firewood, such as cutting terraces into a slope to make gardens with orchards between them, dozing in fire-breaks and access roads, etc...
