restoring a real fire on my house - advise needed!

Russ123_2

With regards to the benefits of increased ventilation i truly believe the re-opening of my fireplace and regular use of this fireplace has cured a cronic damp issue within my cottage; in a previous thread i posted


"Interestingly we have no chimney balloon and do notice the living room to be considerably colder than the rest of the house during the summer months.When we bought the cottage there was a damp issue, in and around the chimney breast. With the reopening of the fireplace and the regular use of it (we go through roughly a ton of coal a year), the damp issue disappeared and hasn't returned in the last couple of years. This is why i am reluctant to block, or even partially block the fireplace even in the summer. (bearing in mind this cottage was for LET and ALL occupants left because of damp)

I know many here wont like open grates, brand them dirty, inefficient, antiquated bits of technology but ours certainly works for us and may have even cured our damp problem?

Whenever i have mentioned this to people it often gets received with suspicious looks, however, i knew it wasn penetrative damp or rising damp (i dont believe it exists) so that only left condensation. Not being an expert on the matter i've always assumed condensation was cured in one of two ways, increased ventilation and/or heat. The open fire offers both of these and touch wood we have had no problems thus far.

I personally recoil in disgust when i see those ugly 'flame effect' electric fires, or worst still if they flash red and blue and have some sort of pebble arrangment inside of them. Yuck!

MummyOfTwo

This is an aspect I havent heard of before but makes very good sense. We suffer a little with damp and cold condensation in this house, mainly for its age, and its construction. it is three storey in a row of terraced houses, but next door is not three storey! looks a bit funny but harks back to WW2 when our town suffered very heavily with bombing and not all families could afford to rebuild the top floor. the kids are snug as bugs on the middle floor, but me and hubby feel the chill on the top floor, which is single wall construction and stuck out to catch the wind coming in from the sea. its also prone to a little damp growing behind furniture now and then, mainly when its very cold. Will be keenly watching to see if there is any change with the real fire in....

A._Badger

Russ is talking a lot of sense. Jeff Howell, who writes for the Sunday Telegraph about building and DIY, is often warnng about this - and he is one of the most knowledgeable writers on old houses. As he points out, they were designed to work that way - not to be wrapped in plastic. The modern obsession with insulation, driven by the artificial inflation of fuel prices, may be a natural reaction to cost, but as Howell regularly points out, it can lead to all sorts of other problems along the way - damp being one of them.

A balance needs to be struck and common sense applied.

Ben84

An alternative that works well for me is an electric dehumidifier. I have an ebac unit that is able to clear up the damp in the whole house - although it's most effective in the room it's placed it. I just plug it in and it pulls litres of water out the air every day, making the house both warm and dry.

TiredGeek

Ben84 wrote: »

An alternative that works well for me is an electric dehumidifier. I have an ebac unit that is able to clear up the damp in the whole house - although it's most effective in the room it's placed it. I just plug it in and it pulls litres of water out the air every day, making the house both warm and dry.

Yep, very good bit of kit. Dry air is easier to warm up, and the dehumidifier actually helps doing that itself. It's amazing just how much water these things can pull out of a seemingly dry house....

jonewer

A._Badger wrote: »

A well designed open fire can generate a tremendous amount of heat and offers distinct aesthetic advantages over stoves, too. I can't remember which thread it was but another poster and I agreed here recently that we were very suspicious of this 90 per loss claim.

I agree that this 90% claim is spurious. I reckon its probably an estimate based on a worse possible case scenario such as an fireplace with no baffle or choke burning a small amount of soggy unseasoned softwood with the front door left open.

My victorian fireplace when burning house coal can belt out so much heat that we have to retreat to the other side of the room and cover our legs to keep the heat off them.

I looked into getting a stove but frankly the set up costs for me, being in Surrey, would have been at least £4k for a stove in the dining room we would hardly ever see.

The fireplace in question used to have a gas fire so I think instead we're going to fit another tiled insert with one of those live fire gas thingys.

Russ123_2

jonewer wrote: »

I agree that this 90% claim is spurious. I reckon its probably an estimate based on a worse possible case scenario such as an fireplace with no baffle or choke burning a small amount of soggy unseasoned softwood with the front door left open.

My victorian fireplace when burning house coal can belt out so much heat that we have to retreat to the other side of the room and cover our legs to keep the heat off them.

I looked into getting a stove but frankly the set up costs for me, being in Surrey, would have been at least £4k for a stove in the dining room we would hardly ever see.

The fireplace in question used to have a gas fire so I think instead we're going to fit another tiled insert with one of those live fire gas thingys.

Here, Here! i couldn't agree more.

I've actually been a bit aggitated when people on this website have tried to tell me my Open Fire is Cr*p and near useless, when in actual fact it functions rather well

hethmar

OP, if its just to sit in front of occasionally and not going to be used as a main form of heating, then an open fire is probably your better bet. Just make sure you have it swept and checked out as you dont want lumps of brickwork dropping into it.

MummyOfTwo

hi all, thought i would give u all an update!

ok i have a big fat hole in the sitting room. sweep has been and said the chimneys in 'these ouses' are fine for open fires, but i ought to look at my gas cowl! so roofer is coming tomorrow to do that. want to see the mess thus far?!

grahamc2003

jonewer wrote: »

I agree that this 90% claim is spurious. I reckon its probably an estimate based on a worse possible case scenario such as an fireplace with no baffle or choke burning a small amount of soggy unseasoned softwood with the front door left open.

My victorian fireplace when burning house coal can belt out so much heat that we have to retreat to the other side of the room and cover our legs to keep the heat off them..

I love open fires, the sound and especially the smell. But none of that changes the thermal characteristics of them, and I'm afraid, you can get efficienciences of less than zero (i.e. more useful heat is lost than actually generated) under the worst cases - so worse than the 10% efficiency quoted (i.e. 90% of the heat lost, if that is what the 90% is).

If you have central heating at a high room temperature and low ambient temp, then lighting an open fire can make the room cooler, simply by the fire causing more room heat being dragged up the chimney than the fire is generating (which of course sucks in cold air from the outside).

For more normal and typical circumstances (i.e. an open fire in an otherwise unheated or very lowly heated room), then there'll be a positive efficiency, but I doubt it would be much higher than 10-15% typically. (I'm only the messenger btw, and not saying that therefore open fires are crap). Basically it's a balance between the radiant heat into the room vs the heat exiting the chimney - and the radiant heat can burn your legs and make you hot even at these lowish efficiencies and a low room temperature.

Stoves simply restrict the air up the chimney to the minimum possible to fully burn the fuel and no more (if set correctly). So the gain of a stove over an open fire is twofold - the complete combustion of the fuel (you can't get that with an open fire), and the (massive) reduction of heat loss up the chimney. It doesn't matter how much you like open fires or dislike stoves, or vv, those characteristics still stand.

I've read, and believe, that stoves are typically 7 times more efficient at heating a room than an open fire, and that backs up my experience when I ripped out my open fire and installed a stove. The tradeoff seems to be for an open fire, you need typically seven times more fuel than for a stove, and for some, that cost will be worth paying to keep the ambiance an open fire creates.