How Fireplaces Work

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know? What's from House stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerome the Jairs. 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 mail, not like a mail. Oh little Jerry just said confirmed. Weird. We've been doing

a lot of this Jerry translating lately. 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 how are you, sir? Great we are fresh off our live shows and Boston, Mass MA and uh Washington, d C and uh 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 Tigna Taro And it was wonderful

we got to meet Ticks. She was just as nice and nonplussed as I would have voted 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 plused. Yeah, I'd learned things all the time on this show. Yeah, me to your favorite part of my job.

And uh, 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 um 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's just here, uh in this article that you found that uh in China their hearts of clay, silt and limestone from like a half a million years ago. And uh, 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, um, 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 years old. Yeah, and I think, um, 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. Um. There was especially in say jolly old London, there was a lot of chimneys that sprung up, a lot of problems that arose, as we'll see later on.

But yeah, the the 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 you It depends what your definition have changed. Hole in the wall with a whole 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 has been relatively unchanged for seven years. It's like toilet paper. Yeah, they're they're not as straight as they used to be. Um Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life. He did about when you know, he was just kind of person who would look around the world and in his everyday surroundings and say, why do

people do it like this? That's stupid. I've been Franklin. There's better as listen to me. Take a peek under my silken robe. 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 nonplused. Yeah, I looked

that up, by the way, So nonplus I'm correct. The nonplus 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 agitated, just but you're definitely not just like laid back. No, So Tignachar was not nonplused. She was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which is Yeah, she's just chill and very sweet. 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, and I didn't want to sound like I was disappointed. She didn't like throw those snap crackers and start taftings. 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, that 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 route anyway. Um, let me 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? Uh So, here's a little stat for you. The National Association of home Builders did a survey, and I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but um it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of seventy seven 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 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 to have a fireplace that you use because it's so waste. That is ghost. Mean what I think it means now in doubting everything, it means super laid back and nonplus.

Oh so like New Yorkers like, oh, you have a fireplace, Yes, how not green? Which I mean they're correct. There's a lot of un greenness associated with fireplace. Sure, you know, especially as far as like air pollution goes air quality. Um, 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 gonna talk about this for a second, if you are a kid and you have um, I don't know, respiratory diseases, you're far likelier to be living in a house where your folks burn would So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be brought on because smoke is gonna 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 by letting that smoke in the particles particulate matter creep in there. Yeah. And also I mean like house fires. There's like two house fires in the United States every year that resulting like ten people's deaths from directly from fireplaces. Yeah. Yeah, But no matter who you talked to, for the most part, the people say still worth it. Ye yeah. I'm gonna die of like blacklong and my house may burn down

before I get a chance too. But I really loved fires in the winter, and I'm really I'm willing to take that risk. So you know my deal or do you? I don't know. Uh. We live in a house that was built in nineteen 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 unless we pay like some pretty good dough 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, am, how about that fireplace? And she says, quit writing on the walls. Uh, We're not getting a fireplace just yet. But maybe I've been there for like ten years. When is when does our life? When do we start living our life? Is my question? With a with a fireplace, have you considered trading something she wants for the fireplace

that doesn't work like that? Have you considered begging. That doesn't work either. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you. Well, I mean, you know what I do. I wait until she goes out of town and they just do it yourself. Yeah, but do it terrible way so that somebody is a professionalist to come in and go behind you. Yeah, and then they have no choice. You're like, I gotta get the fireplace guy in here. Now there's a giant hole in the wall. Uh. 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. But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. I want that particular matter my lungs. You and seventies seven percent of us homeowners, Um, 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 they're all there's alternatives, that's right, But we're gonna 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 years ago. It's true, man, Yeah, I didn't realize some of these parts existed. So, um, I did learn

quite a bit in this. I thought it was pretty much the firebox and the flu that ran up the chimney and that's it. But there's more to it than that there. Well, yeah, these are I think these are the improvements that came over time. So you do have the heart that you mentioned that's gonna be built out of something fireproof. You don't want a wood heart. That'd be bad. It's probably rock or brick. And that's 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 fireplaces. Those ones are like hand 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, okay, which I

never did. Yeah, that that is pretty nice. You got the 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. Um, 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. 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. Uh. You have your firebox. That is just what you think it is. That's the square typically, although they're shaped a little differently. Now. Um, that's the square that holds your fire right, and it's where the smoke starts to collect. Um. What you're sending the stuff up to behind behind the firebox 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. And this 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, it's gonna be brick almost always. In the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf. It's concave. Yeah, because if you if you look at a fireplace, you just think it just goes straight back and up right. Well that some of the old designs did well, they

were stupid. Yeah, that's why how it's changed them. 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. But when there's no fire you don't want to do it. Period. You'll see that there's actually a shelf there and it's angled forward to in front of that. Like like I said, it used to be just sort of a cube and it went straight up. Now it's sort of zig zags uh 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, um, when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. It's almost basically a protective overhanging and um it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff from falling into the firebox too. Correct. Uh, that smoke shelf underneath it, you're gonna have the damper

and that is that covering. That's uh, it's movable, and that separates the firebox from the place above it, and that keeps that's you know, and you don't have your fire, that's when you close. We used to stay close the flu uh 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 uh little

uh 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 gonna find out really quickly. Yeah, it's closed. It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure, Yeah,

it's got a throat, why not what else we have? Um, Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the flu could close too, it's unnecessary, Oh you think, sure, But then uh, at the very top of the chimney, there's something called sparker rest or, which is usually like some sort of mesh grate that will allow like gas and in air, but we'll keep um 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. Uh, the chimney cap can 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 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, two bricks, and it would just drop into a bucket below,

as would your poop. There are different buckets under your house that collected things. Do you want to make sure you knew which bucket you're grabbing at any given time. I didn't want to 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. Sure, just the screen. We had one of those in in my high school house and it was a We had

a gas fireplace. Yeah it was fine, but I was like, this is not wood. All right, Well let's take a break in. Um, we'll talk about would after this. So we're back, Chuck, and we're going to talk This would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about basically the physics of how a fireplace works, because there are some physics involved, 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, Like how

kind of crazy that is? And said there are two challenges, one not setting your house on fire to keep the smoke from entering the room. But yeah, I never really thought about it. And everything we just talked about basically was to prevent the first part catching your house on fire, that's 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 when you look around your house, uh, 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 and to keep the smoke from going filling up your living room, which again you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your your damper open,

which I had before. Um, if you if you have air comeing into your house, then you can keep the air, the smoke from the fire going up the way it's supposed to. And and that happened simply because heat tends to rise. Yeah you don't. You know. One of the places I get a nice flow of air in my house is from closed windows. Oh yeah, you got thin windows? Yeah, we have it. We've only redone a few of the windows. That's on my like must do list is to get

all the windows replaced. But it ain't cheap. 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. Like, where's this coming from? It's going through the glass. It feels like it's defying the laws of physics. It's freezing near my windows. Now I remember you mean I had a house like that, knows I mean the wavy,

vaguely wavy kind of windows. Yeah, those were thin. It's kind of neat though, to think that I'm living like a settler basically. Yeah, in parts of my training your own butter so, um, 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 mains. Your house is catching fire, I means you're literally touching something hot, correct, Yeah, But confection, of course, it's when that hot air circulating to cooler areas of your home in this gate, and the radiation is just literally feeling that flame warmth. Yeah, it's a In the case of the fireplace, it's infrared and visible light,

electro magnetic radiation. Basically, there is actually some radio waves in some microwaves produced by a fire, which is kind of cool. But for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation and you're seeing visible light radiation. Right, So when you're when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being admitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection and can yeah big times right.

Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is um 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 pointing 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 a fireplace better. You gotta understand though, too, like when he was alive, these weren't just for like charm, No, they were to like stay alive, and the idea that you were wasting all is 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, 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, 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 that's being irradiated out of the fireplace. It's being sucked in. And as a result again that that when the air is sucked into the fire and is pushed up the flu through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. It's creating what's called a negative pressurization, right, and that means that air wants to come in and replace the air

that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So coal they're from outside is being drawn in, which is how like you said before, right, 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 there from the outside. Yeah, and it's not um it says here here's the 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 a k a. The wood burning stove a the TV with the fire burning on it. Right, I love a wood burning stove. Man, those are great, do you. I've never really been into those. Yeah, and 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, right, Yeah, you don't put uh the skateboard next to it the banana peel okay, step one. But um, and you know you're not gonna 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 of of stoves stoves, and there are some that are kind of moud. Oh well, that's cool, so

they're trying to bring it into the future. Yes, well, they're remarkably efficient. Um well, how much did you say? Five cubic leaders? I believe of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace the average fireplace, and only twenty for a woodburning stove. Yeah, that's pretty efficient. So they're super hot. You can you can cook on them too, you can boil your water and do all sorts of things. You know, just don't touch it. No. I think the

Randazzo has had one in their place in Connecticut. Oh yeah, yeah, and I think it's supposedly worked super well, like it'll it'll heat a room and then some yeah you know. Well, and the the reason why it's 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 warmer around it from being sucked in, right. 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. 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. They're like mid century design that are super mod um Swedish ones, uh. And then there's like they're ones that look kind of like the traditional ones, but they're they're newly built and like their improved designs. Remember the old seventies fireplaces that were uh like orange um metal, and that would the Swedish one I'm talking about. Really, it's based on that old old seventies Look, No, that's the one I'm talking

about the seventies. Okay, Yeah, there's newer ones too, but that the iconic orange one. Yeah that's yeah. Yeah. Like my friend, one friend in high school, Chris Boten, had the most seventies house. Oh dude, it was wonderful, like it was the orange fireplace surround like built in a terrarium set deal with plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall. Oh I'm sure there was macromy at some point, but it was just it had one of those sunken living rooms,

you know. Yeah, and looking back now like it's a 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. Like his hit a water but of course, but um 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. Uh yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I can imagine, because yeah, I mean, like key parties are happening and people are drinking eggnog around the orange lacquered fireplace. It's a wonderful time. But let's say you have just the regular, regular old fireplace to start. Yeah, right, you want to 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 all got into the airnet and go to house 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 coming knowledge to me. Yeah, there's some details in there that I don't know. Like hardwood's right, you

don't want to burn pine or any soft wood. Okay, you want your hardwood's like hickory ash oak kind of stuff,

and you want it seasoned. That's the key. Yeah. You can't go cut down a tree in the 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, 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, man, well, okay, that

roads guy, I'm gonna go back. Here's how. Here's how. You got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch him score him. Take two logs 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 that you know this is North Georgia, lob lolly pine. You don't know what you're talking about. You'd say, well, pines the soft wood. I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods?

I want to call it. Shoot off my property and leave the boiled peanuts. You'd say, I'm gonna take half of the boiled peanuts for my time. Yeah, I feel like we always get wet wood, but um, at least six months you want that wood drying out. They say a full year. What you're looking for is moisture level by the time you're burning it, right, you could also put in a moisture level temperature moisture indicator in the end. Yeah,

there you go that you buy the big city. But you you look at the ends 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 the dead giveaways the hollow thud sound. I'm gonna I didn't know that, so I'm gonna try that the hollow thud or the 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 like part of it. The fire grate is like this iron stand. It's a great. There's really no other way to describe it, although some fireficionados suggest that you should use what are called and irons, 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 through. The great does the same thing, except um, it keeps burning like embers on the grade. A little more. The reason why people are like and irons are grays because, however, you have it a great, you're an and iron. You want to keep a bed of embers going because that is going to eventually become hot enough that you could throw anything on there and it'll start to catch fire. Um. So when you 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 a half a leader of kerosene on this that it starts. You do not misspeak. That is just a joke. Kids. You don't ever want to use any sort of lighter, fluid or anything like that to start indoor fire. Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place, so

stop right now. 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 acceller it. Well, people don't get newspapers anymore, so you can just uh light your kindle or your iPad right, throw that in there instead. It'll it'll start, But that kiddeling is gonna catch, and if your wood is season it'll catch too. And

then all of a sudden you gotta fire. Yeah, you may want to adjust that damper a little bit just to keep your air flowed how you want it um and then and again when you're 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 your your fireplace, your chimney is above that neutral pre sure plane, you're gonna be okay, the air is

gonna want to go in. Um 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 a ninety year old windows right where you don't have to worry about it at all to do because the air just flows through freely. So if you wanna 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. Uh. One is called a tubular grate, and that is exactly what you think it is. Instead of just a great um made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. It looks like sort of like the motorcycle, uh, exhaust pipes

and things. So, um, you know, it's just their tubular So it's gonna draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes, and then it's gonna 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 fireplaces working properly, 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 the the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the great can go out into the room, Bam, you're set. Oh is that a thing? Yeah, I haven't seen that. Uh. There's another thing called a well this is what when um 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 great 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. 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 it was happening. Like every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has kind of had the same deal to me, 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's something to do with that. I don't know. Maybe I'm a super smeller. Are you a super smeller? What do you smell right now? I smell Knoll like three three rooms over. You are a super smeller because

we are hermetically sealed in here? Not true? Uh? And then those glass doors you talked about, it's another way to increase efficiency, but you're awesome. So going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much as 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 room, you're in the fire enough so that you don't mind, or if you're just after the aesthetic, then yeah, good for you. You mean. And I lived in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years. We were hooked on it, hooked on it, yeah, oh yeah, and we we could get that that room like hot y you know, if you keep the fire going long enough. That's the key. You just have to waste more 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 very depressing history of child labor. Mm hmm. All right, Josh, we've been talking about would 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 look 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. Um, so you would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off. Got so she just retrofitted it. Um actually I did it my brother into full gas with the fake logs that, um, 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 shape to look

like three logs laying on top of each other. No, that it's come a long way, I'll say that. Don't They have beds of embers now too and all that? But then it catch the little flickery glow. Yep, what is it? They've come a long way with trying to simulate that look. Pica pica pica. I don't know what that is. Uh, 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. Are you talking about pretty pretty No, yeah, but that's something different. Yeah, I don't they go back and find it. They We'll just end it. This whole part out. Uh So the gas logs um covering the gas event. You're gonna burn that fire behind glass, it's gonna give off radiant and convicted heat. You're probably gonna have a air um not recycling what

I call it exchanger air exchanger. They're 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. It draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less right, Um, so it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to to burn. Is it's gonna say, you keep it. I'm gas. I'm super efficient. I love you

in ways that wood could never imagine. Wood is dirty and bumbling, and why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas. So if you're getting an new house, you're probably gonna have a gas fireplace. If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably gonna be a gas fireplace. That's the direction they're steering you these days. Yeah, oh yeah, I would guess because gas. I would guess you're gonna 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've got to find a builder from nineteen basically, 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, it's like, this is real. So they're very efficient to these gas fireplaces. The gas

burns cleanly. Uh, they even have them that are event free. Um, but people also say, you know what if your house is not like Chucks and it is actually pretty tight sealed and sealed up, then uh, they can actually deplete oxygen or moisture can build up. So the jury is still out somewhat on these gas fireplaces. I say the jury is in and I'm the jury, and I say, event free fireplace is a stupid idea. It's pumping carbon dioxide into your house. That's not a that's never good.

You would think, yeah, you can get an ethanol fireplace. This one seems like okay, you've seen him before, right, Like if you go to a Marriott courtyard or something like that, they'll have like the chair situated around a table with a fireplace in the middle of the table. It's nut. It's the flame is actually cold. It's basically like right, it's basically like a stern o fireplace. Yeah, you know you want to light your fun due pod or something like that from beneath it's the same thing.

I think, virtually. Uh, And then you can get the uh woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace. Well, there's some now where you can get like an entertainment center with like a TV and then beneath it a fake electric fireplace. Yeah, it's cool. So an electric fireplaces has no fire. Um, it is a heater and it you know, it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old and squinting, if you're squinty four year old. But you know, we don't want to yuck

someone's yum. 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 emission free on the user end, it's still electricity, which means producing emissions at the coal firepower plant that's producing that electricity. Don't be cool if you're like, oh, it's a mission free No, no, we're gonna yuck that yum. Uh.

Safety wise, you gotta watch out for those sparks. If you got carpet around or hard woods, I reckon keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace, 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. Smoke detectors not quite enough, Yeah, I think I think you have to have those now. Didn't that the new code? I don't know. I haven't read the zoning codes in a while. Building codes. Uh, 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 and see 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 uh uh, maybe he just wasn't feeling it that thing. No, he

didn't put on a good show. Um. He he came over because he's in their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces. So I thought this guy is gonna 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 like that's a lot of work. Man. You're gonna have to fix your chimney on the inside and it's cracked here, and you got this, and he got that. I was like, yeah, it's that's what you advertise, is you fix old situations.

Have you you should bring somebody else out. Yeah I didn't like that guy. Yah, 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 while factor? Maybe yes, you're correct, you do need a pro every now and then to come out. And they're called chimney sweets. Yeah.

Creosote is something if you look up creosote c R E O S O T E online. Uh, it sort of looks like black lava built up on the inside of your chimney, right, and it itself could catch fire 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.

And uh, if your chimneys 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 too by fours, Like oh, oh, you don't want to burn that pressure treated two by four by the way, as would I don't think we mentioned that. Uh. 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 a dura flame. It's a prefab log. It's a chemical log, but it's supposed to break down that creosote. 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, I 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 them, 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, which is what chimney sweeps did. Yeah. Man, if you if you want Moxie and your chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say, I want to buy your four year old

boy and making my chimney sweep slave. Yeah. I mean earlier we teased and promised the child labor um horror show, and that's pretty much what things were like in Jolly Old England. After sixty second September to the 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 You 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, stick this boy up in there. They were your quote unquote apprentice, which basically was child slaves, unpaid child labor

zero dollars 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, I thought you're gonna say sponsorships, Like they would show up like they're Chevy tahoeck yet or something is like nothing gets your chimney clean, like son of a gum by stp so um. 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 eight in eighteen inch wide chimney and uh chip loose this creosote and soot that would then because they're working above their head, would follow 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. 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 the formation of their skeletons. Because these kids are like four or five, six, eight, ten, twelve years old, they're still developing, but they're spending like

hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So their bones, especially the bones and their ankles and knees tended to grow in a deformed way. There's something the first industrial linked cancer ever identified. It is called chimney sweeps cancer. Other people call it scrotal carcinoma. Yeah, where the the um scrotum was irritated by soot and it would produce warts, and these wards, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually if it was

if it wasn't cut out, would um. 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 uh get up pre dawn. You worked till the nighttime hours, three hundred and sixty four days a year. Uh. The one day that these kids would get off was May Day, International Labor Day. Uh. They would sleep then. You know we said they collected

that ash and soot and sold it. They would store all this stuff in sacks and the kids would then sleep in those rooms, still ingesting all this stuff in the air. Uh, and quite often they would literally get stuck and dye in these tim Here here's the part where I started a hyperventilate just thinking about this. From 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 aspixate their their abdomen, couldn't couldn't take in breaths any longer. Right, Um. It happened a lot, and actually finally it happened enough times that Parliament started to get involved. They first got involved in with the Chimney Sweeps Act and they said, you know what,

this is crazy. You guys are buying four year old kids. You can't do that. Emney sweeps can be no younger than eight. That was their first stab at at at at reform, right, 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 aged twenty one, which was significant, but apparently it wasn't really enforced until eighteen seventy five when this 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 a gentleman by the name of William Wire. And I say, gentlemen, what I mean is a scumbag. Uh. And he was cleaning a hospital, Chimney Fullborn Hospital, and he got stuck and the great

efforts were made to rescue him. Actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died and Wire has actually found guilty of manslaughter. And his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody, and it became part of the campaign. And um, that was pretty much the end of using kids. Uh you know, he was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England, and England, I guess in the US they

kept using him for a while. So shameful really is now if you see a chimney, sweet tell four year old to go up in the chimney. You called police because that is illegal these days. No better where you live. Okay, let's all agree to that. Do you got anything else? No fireplaces? Just in time for the fall? Well yeah, November here in Atlanta and in the mid eighties, so right,

ready to get that fireplace one? That's right. If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light of fire, you can go find that up by typing fireplace in the search bar. How stuff works. 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? And 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 unquote. 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. Uh. There is a huge debate in the grammar world. UH, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivists or descriptivists when it comes to the rules of grammar. Uh, it's a constantly evolving topic and arguably grammar is a constantly evolving entity. I just thought i'd share my thoughts and 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. 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 the haters. Yeah. Ah. If you want to get in touch of this, like Colleen did, is it Colleen? Sure? Uh? Who cares? Actually, I don't know. It goes either way or whatever. Yeah,

she said, you can call me whatever. Uh. If you want to, uh, get in touch with us, like Cauliflower did, you can tweak to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at house Stiff First dot com and has always joined us over at home on the web. Stuff you should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com