Improve the heat efficiency of your fireplaces by 25% or more by just doing a few simple things, you can improve the efficiency of your fireplace and draw more heat out of your fireplace, while enjoying the ambiance and beauty of a wood-burning fireplace that already it’s in your house. If you have a little working knowledge of fireplaces, then you can understand why improving the amount of heat a fireplace puts out is important to the overall enjoyment of having a fireplace in your home. If you are new to burning real wood fireplaces, there are some very simple ways to improve the amount of heat your fireplace will produce. The first thing you would like to know about your fireplace is whether it is in good working order. As a masonry contractor in the Seattle area, we see quite a few chimneys each year that are not safe to burn and need to be repaired. Some of the things you would want to look for would be if the chimney needs repair or has loose bricks, smoke problems, water damage, or damper problems. One of the best ways to see if your fireplace is ready to burn is to request an inspection from a masonry contractor in your area. Now is the time to start that fire and as we said earlier we want the fireplace to burn efficiently.
The first rule of thumb for any fire to burn efficiently is what kind of fuel is it burning? In order for a wood-burning fireplace to burn well, it is necessary to burn dry, dry wood of good quality. When you burn quality wood, your fire will burn cleaner, hotter and increase the efficiency of your fireplace. You can tell I’m already using good quality cured wood to help my fireplace burn well, but I still want my fireplace to improve its efficiency. There are still several other things you can do to improve your fireplace’s efficiency by another 25% or more. Each and every fireplace should have a glass door installed, if only for safety reasons, installing a glass door is one of the best ways to improve the efficiency of your fireplace for a very low cost. You might be thinking that if I put glass doors on my fireplace, the heat will stay behind the glass and just go up the chimney. This is not the case, the heat from your fireplace will radiate through the glass even if the glass doors are closed, so a good way to use your glass doors is to burn the fireplace with the glass doors open and the screen. of security. closed. In this way you have all the beauty and atmosphere of your fire before you.
If your fireplace is equipped with outside air or make-up air, you can also burn the fireplace with the glass doors closed and the safety screen open, in this mode you can see your beautiful fire and feel the radiant heat, but not be wasting the room air through the fireplace. Make-up air or outside air can be installed in most fireplaces if you don’t have it in your fireplace now. These two things will also outweigh the reasons why some fireplaces smoke and also why your fireplace smells like drafty smoke when it’s not being used. For those two reasons alone, all fireplaces should have glass doors installed. The best reason I’ve saved for last is that your fireplace is costing you heat loss all day and night, even when you’re not using it. The reason is that the chimney damper is not airtight, they are made that way to keep a certain amount of space even when closed. So if you have a fireplace that doesn’t have a glass door, you’re wasting energy going up and down the chimney. In this article, it’s easy to see how you can get more heat out of your fireplace with just a few small changes, allowing you to burn outside air instead of the air you already paid to heat, and by installing glass doors to stop heat loss.