Fighting humidity in the house

[Bullwinkle]

small box fan accomplishing the same thing with 10 percent of the foot print

[gtill]

Devany, old fashioned smokey fireplaces near other houses are a no, but with the new designs (EPA driven), there is a Govt tax credit to 1500$ to replace the wasteful electrial means of controlling mildew and heating house. You might want to check with the EPA before knocking a functional form of heating and drying, you are killing our air with smoke from oil burning electric plants.
I would consider an oceanfront house to be the worst form of pollution, to Kapu our rare coastline for oneself should be a crime.

Gordon J Tilley

[wyatt]

We are installing a wood stove this weekend. It qualified for the The IRS BIOMASS $1500.00 tax credit.

Wyatt

"Yearn to understand first and to be understood second."
-- Beca Lewis Allen

[gtill]

Wyatt, good for you, I'll be there shortly. Probably more people would if jerks wouldn't be making unfounded statements against all burning. Some people would rather pay someone to burn the most damaging and destructive fuel (Oil), and act like Mr Environment. The hyprocracy shown by so many "enviromentalists" especially the very rich!

[MarkP]

Wood burning appliances in general and open fireplaces in particular can be very polluting and often are so, but they do not have to be. Whether or not they are depends to a huge amount on how they are operated. Shockingly, in the 70 when wood burning stoves came on the scene in large numbers, many people actually would cram them full of wood and choke down the air so that there would be a few embers left in the morning. Think of filling your tank every evening then letting the car idle overnight with the choke on full just so you wouldn't have to start it in the morning. Car or woodstove, the results are the same; clouds of greasy black smoke, terrible waste of fuel, and a filthy exhaust system that will eventually impair the operation of your appliance, if not actually catch fire. Nevertheless there were those who were proud that they could do this and would describe with satisfaction how their stove would burn (smolder more like) all night. Modern clean burning wood stoves are so well designed and automated that they make it difficult for the user to screw things up. However any old metal box can be operated relatively efficiently and cleanly if your wood is properly seasoned, if you build several small hot fires, and if you never choke the air down. All the bells and whistles on modern stoves are there to help the stove burn cleanly under part load conditions. Don't ask your stove to operate under part load or less than ideal conditions and it will burn cleanly. For the operator this means a lot more stove tending, being nearby to feed it wood in modest amounts when it can handle it, getting up at night if need be or just tolerating the cold till morning. Frankly a lot of this is a lot bigger deal in cold climates. Here, light a fire in the evening then let it go out overnight.

Fireplaces are a much different animal. I define a fireplace as being open. Fireplace inserts or other airtight appliances are merely wood-stoves with big glass doors. Frankly, fireplaces will never compete with any kind of airtight appliances as far as efficiency is concerned as long as we are talking the standard enclosed family residence where we expect the air to be warm. This is because of the vast amount of air that goes up the chimney, which must be replaced by air that leaks in from outside. Wait a minute, I am thinking of the frigid northeast in winter again. Here in Hawaii, and here in this thread, we are actually looking for a way to ventilate the house. I can't recall where I read this (decades ago) but I distinctly remember reading that the ancient Romans in Italy used a fireplace in a back room where nobody went to cool and ventilate the house in the evening when it began to be cooler outside than inside. As long as you were not in line of sight with the flames the fire did not heat you, and everywhere the air leaked in it was obviously the same temperature as the outside. To this end these Roman fireplaces were made especially deep with small openings so the heat couldn't get out and again nobody went near them unless they wanted to get warm.
In the American Colonies in Benjamin Franklin's time fireplaces were used for heat in the winter. Keep in mind that there was no central heating. I read an article in the Conservationist magazine published by the DEC of New York State about what it was like to live in New York in the 1700s. Houses were build of logs or rough clapboards. Tyvek house-wrap did not exist and houses were extremely drafty. People relied on foot thick down quilts and occasionally woke up with snow on their beds. Yes, there were snowdrifts indoors. It was the fireplace or nothing. Some brave soul would get up and start the fire and everyone would cluster around it. The old wingback chairs were not just a style. When facing the open fire they kept the inevitable draft of cold and recently outdoor air blowing toward the fireplace off of your neck and created a little microclimate within the confines of the chair where a certain level of comfort could be achieved.

Benjamin Franklin did research on enclosed wood stoves because of his concern over American dependence on "sea coals", coal shipped by sea from England of all places. A contemporary of his, Benjamin Thompson, later known as Count Rumford, a loyalist who left in a hurry during the revolution, also spent a lot of time thinking about fireplace efficiency and went on to invent the Rumford Fireplace. Like the roman fireplace, it was a simple open fireplace. Unlike the roman fireplace, it was extremely shallow and designed to capture the smoke with as little air going up the chimney as possible while putting as much flame in line of sight with the living space as possible. It is fascinating to think of the same device, a fireplace, being optimized to do two diametrically opposed tasks, one being to provide as much ventilation with as little heating as possible and the other to provide as much heating with as little ventilation as possible.

No matter what, any open fireplace will produce a substantial draft. If optimized and operated properly they can also provide quite a bit of radiant heat. In fact they are a better source of heat for open areas than any other because radiant heat goes in a straight line and is unaffected by drafts, so if you want to heat an open area, there is no other way. I have seen LPG radiant heaters for sale at Costco for use on patios. Finally, if operated properly, they can also be clean burning, but this takes a properly designed and built Rumford type fireplace and extreme attention to detail. Heat from an open fireplace is like a salmon swimming upstream. The draft caused by the fireplace is like the current. The heat has got to rapidly get past the worst of the draft or it will simply get swept downstream and up the chimney. Radiant heat does this when it shines against the end user or against the opposite wall. Heat absorbed by the fireplace stones is like a feeble salmon. It never makes it past the rapids and soon winds up downstream.

Five paragraphs on how to burn wood. Gawd, I must be some kind of a pyromaniac. Anyhow it seems to me that an open fireplace could, if done right, be a classy way to get both warmth and ventilation, both of which are necessary for humidity control.

[gtill]

I agree with the above, woodstoves are plenty, a fireplace would be an excess. They also have glass fronts so you get some fire viewing. Properly fed they are very clean, and some even have catalytic converters. With the cost of propane and electric, they make sense to me!

[AlohaSteven]

MarkP has probably forgotten more about this topic than I ever knew, yet to the note "Fireplaces are a much different animal. I define a fireplace as being open. Fireplace inserts or other airtight appliances are merely wood-stoves with big glass doors" maybe I can add a description of one useful variation on the beast.

Here in our Anchorage house there are two fireplaces, one downstairs and another upstairs, both of which work great for light, heat, and (if one desired) ventilation. The aspect of them which is so nifty is that while both are built-in features of the house (brick downstairs and fieldstone upstairs) there are two separate air flow systems in each. Slots in the stonework admit air which flows up and around the metal box atop firebrick in which the logs burn; the metal encasing the fire heats up and in turn passes that heat into air flowing over its outer surface, then the heated room air (still clean, free of smoke) rises up and out of other slots above the fireplace openings back into the room. The fireplace proper has baffles above and below the two sets of folding glass doors which can be slid into place, so air flows into the combustion chamber and then exits the house through the chimney pipe. They are full-fledged fireplaces in every sense and look just like conventional simple cavity style of open fireplaces (unless you look carefully and see the slots hidden in the rockwork below and above) yet thanks to this feature work great for heating the air in a room (with zero smoke). Move your hand around the wall when a fire is burning and you can feel the gushers of heated air pouring out the upper slots. If one wants lots of ventilation then leave the glass doors wide open, though that is not a goal in this context.

These are way better in every regard as a design than the inefficient, smelly, smokey fireplaces my great-parents had once upon a time.

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Vienna Teng in Düsseldorf, "Soon love soon."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8-mIouMbqM

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[Bullwinkle]

Dont forget the screens...


Trying to keep things airy and light here ... decided to do windows... The screens were down right smelly and skanky - green ...

bleach based cleaner, and a garden hose did the trick... much better airflow to boot.

cant get over how bad the screens did smell ... heads up

Aloha

[DTisme]

Sorry - haven't been on punaweb for over a week - nope, no drapes. We have finally gotten all the carpeting out - the last room was particularly bad - very damp and stinky - of course it was the MB! Let the room air out for a few days then installed new "fake wood" flooring w/moisture underlayment. MUCH better already. I will let you all know progress. I HAVE noticed, though, that if we leave the windows open at night, it is much worse in the a.m. We have a lot of foliage on our lot, plus a pond and pool so there's a BUNCH of moisture getting in from out there. We're going to look into solar. In the meantime, I'm afraid Helco's gonna get our $$ from the fans and the dehumidifier. Mahalo all for all your help!