It took me two whole days, but I finally figured out how to work our new house’s old-timey stove.
It’s the first time I’ve fired it since we bought the house this summer. This thing is a lot more complicated than it seems. It has a main damper and a bypass damper, a separate air intake and it hadn’t been fired up for 6 months so the flue was full of cold air and humidity.
But crucially, it sits inside a northern house that’s so well insulated it’s airtight enough for the fire to pull a vacuum inside the house, snuff itself out and create enough of a backdraft to smoke up the entire house in seconds when all the windows are closed.
It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the dampers, stop the air extractor and crack a window open when I add a fresh log to avoid turning the whole family into smoked meat 🙂 But now the flue is warm, the draft is going good and the house is sitting at a balmy 82 degrees while it’s freezing outside.
Nice!
Get a CO detector. If the venting can fail do not use it. This sounds incredibly dangerous. A fireplace that’s unattended must not kill everyone in the house. Back draft is bad.
The fireplace is never unattended. We only go to bed when there are embers only left in it.
Yeah having grown up in a house that was built about 100 years ago, sounds like what we had on the regular.
Ofc you should have the chimneys inspected and cleaned, but if that’s fine ite no wörry. Did we often have smoke inside? Eh, maybe not often, but with regular occasion. The house had like six fireplaces or so, two large chimneys.
So if my grandma who used them for her whole life occasionally also had amoke in the house, I’m sure it’s fine and not something you need to stop using your fireplaces for.
A CO detector is not a major money or time investment.
Yes, I have one 🙂 These things, and smoke detectors are legally sold at cost here. But cost is no object to me for things that can save our lives.
This is great and all but mishaps happen. Planning for a world in which nothing goes wrong is not realistic. Some day life happens. Also this puts everyone on an unsustainable standard of diligence.
I think that’s a little bit of modern alarmism. Humans lived with literally open fires in a top ventilated hut 5ever and not even that long ago. But a CO detector isn’t a terrible idea
Yeah, but not in well insulated rooms. This is not an old danger.
I had one but the constant beeping was giving me a headache.
(I kid, I kid. We live in a shiny new concrete apartment with no fireplace and the regulated 8 smoke- and co2-detectors linked to a central panel etc etc)
Wood fires generally do not produce co. Co comes from coal and natural gas and propane. I support redundancy of having a co detector, but not for your reasons.
Edit: Thanks for the correction. I added the word “generally”. The primary reason for me saying that is that there were basically no deaths from CO while Korea had wood as their heat source then when coal was introduced, they suddenly had a huge spike in CO related deaths, and this warning came while I was doing some bushcrafting research for making charcoal. I thought it applied generally to all heating wood fires that are not first turned to charcoal.
Absolutely false: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_fuel#Combustion_by-products.
Please do basic research before making claims like that. That’s dangerous misinformation.
Based on the other comments, i updated my post.
I appreciate the link. I read through it and it was primarily about general combustion, and mentioned that Wood smoke contained VOCs. I think CO might be one of those referenced, but the link did not go into any discussion of CO, so I would like to know how this “basic research” is relevant to our “CO” specific discussion.
This is an amazing post. Why would chemistry care where the carbon you are burning is coming from? Why would fossil sources be bad, but renewables not? I am actually interested in your rationale.
First, i had enough pushback to get me to update the original post. I needed to say “generally doesn’t make CO”. This is based on wood definitely can emit CO when burning “charcoal” e.g. wood without enough O2 or fresh wood.
Regarding my rationale, I thought it had to do with the spacing or timing of the burn through each grain/fibre. Wood contains water/sap and would therefore have catalysts or contaminants that would change CO into something that would be easier to detect and remove (e.g. irritating ash) than any of the fossil fuels.
I would expect the higher temperature of a coal fire to be conducive to co formation. Maybe wood produces more of a draft. Anecdotally there actually does seem to be a perceived difference, but I can’t find a reputable source. I am not sure if an oxygen starved organic fire would, for example, produce more fancy carbon and hydrogen containing compounds as opposed to CO which is the only compound produced by a starved coal fire. Those carbohydrogens would probably have a strong aroma preventing co from sneaking up on you.
Hence I would conclude that you are actually right that there is a much greater risk from burning pure carbon. The kind of coal you are using may have a strong impact on this, but I would expect you to use coal whose impurities have been removed.
This is incorrect. Anything that produces CO2 when burned, will instead produce CO when not provided with enough O, including wood.
People regularly die from CO poisoning from smouldering wood fires.
Thanks for the correction. I updated my post.