Articles
Search:

Home | Home | Home Improvement



Fireplace Design Increases Its Efficiency







Most home buyers have a fireplace on their wish list. In many cases, it is the appearance of the fireplace that makes it so desirable. Of course, a fireplace is also a place for a fire and, therefore, heat. As the prices of electricity, natural gas and heating oil rise, more people look to their fireplaces for additional heat. Many fireplaces use the same fuel as the home's central heating system. If you want to get all the heat you can from your fireplace fuel, look to the fireplace design to make sure it's as efficient as possible.

Air, Fuel, Heat

Fire is made from three components: air, fuel and heat. Increasing the efficient use of these three elements will make your fireplace a more efficient source of heat. A wood-burning fireplace with a chimney presents special problems for the air part of the equation. Most fireplaces are found in a home with central heating. That means that if the fireplace design draws the air from the room, it is taking in warm air, heating it up and sending much of it out of the chimney into the cold. As more cold air is drawn into the home to be heated by a furnace, drawn into the fire and sent up the chimney, a net loss of heat occurs.

The fireplace design to combat this situation includes an air intake unit that draws air for the fireplace from outside combined with glass fireplace doors and a blower to direct the heat into the room. The addition of a fireplace insert can go far in making a fireplace design more efficient. The addition of an air intake unit will also help by adding air that hasn't been warmed by another, equally expensive fuel. The intake should be located on an outside wall. Fireplace inserts are available that include outside air intake.

Heat doesn't only come from the fire. A fireplace design should have a mass of masonry on the outside wall to keep heat from escaping through the wall. The masonry of the fire box or the design of the insert should absorb heat while the fire burns and release it after the fire is out. This will only work if the heat is not lost through the chimney. If you don't already have a fireplace, you might consider a stove type that is entirely within the room. This type of fireplace design doesn't lose any heat through the wall and most modern stoves are designed to limit chimney heat loss. If you want to use your fireplace as a source of heat, remember to examine the fireplace design for efficiency.


Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com

Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.

A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points. Also if you are looking for Google Chrome Extensions you can check out that link.

RSS

You can click the XML Icon Above to Read Home Improvement Articles Via RSS!

Design by SEO Info: SEO Forum

Providing Articles on everything from Credit