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well, i'm going to have figure out which one is best?!!! and, i know you were kidding, jd! had to go back and see what i wrote. "bagging your heads" would be quite uncomfortable. but, to each his own if you're into that kind of thing.
malia paha o lohe aku
perhaps they will hear
"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
w. james
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I live up on North Glenwood at around 2800 feet... and I use my fireplace regularly.
A standard fireplace is pretty but doesn't do much to warm a house. Ours has a system with a thermostat and electric blowers so that once a certain temperature is reached in the burn box it blows warm air into the main room of the house. Although it came equipped with side vents that could be run to multiple rooms for warm air, we chose to only use it in the great room of the house. It kicks some great heat. I do not know the numberic efficiency.
Wood stoves are a little different and have a rustic feel to them. They are generally very efficient and I would say without much fear of being "wrong" that you will be much happier with a wood stove or fireplace like mine in that area. It can be 40 degrees in a morning and you will love the drying effect of wood burning... reduces mold and mildew problems very well.
Aloha and Enjoy,
Pam
Just another day in P A R A D I S E !!
I want to be the kind of woman that, when my feet
hit the floor each morning, the devil says
"Oh Crap, She's up!"
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All this talk about fireplaces at higher elevations leads me to ask if an assumption I have been making is valid...
Am I correct in assuming that a home to be built in HPP on 3rd Avenue will need no furnace?
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Generally, a fireplace is a decorative accent and really doesn't do much to actually heat the place. If you want heat, use a wood stove. You can get them with glass doors so you can see the fire if you want decorative.
Paradise Park doesn't usually need a heater. If it gets cold there, an electric blanket at night will probably be enough to keep your toes toasty. Or a heated waterbed if your house is built on a concrete slab and can support the weight.
Volcano can be cold enough that you'd want to actually have some sort of interior heater in your house. Electricity is about thirty five to forty cents a kilowatt hour so it is way too expensive to use to heat a house. Does anyone sell fuel oil for heating houses? Are there any furnace installers around here? Fireplaces are terribly inefficient and you'd need a lot of firewood to heat a house with a standard fireplace. Kerosene heaters can heat a small house, but kerosene is expensive and smelly when starting and stopping the heater. I haven't a clue who sells wood pellets for wood pellet stoves but there might be someone around.
A small wood stove is probably one of the few valid answers for a workable heater around here as far as I know. What do you folks up the hill use to stay warm? We aren't that far up the hill and get by with an electric blanket for about two months of the year and adding in a kerosene heater for maybe one week out of the year.
"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson
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My parents have lived in Central New York and heated with wood for the last 25 years so I have some direct experience. They use an enclosed wood stove exclusively for heating. The house has an open fireplace which we have used occasionally in the past but no longer since it at best does little and at worst robs the house of heat due to the massive amount of air it sucks up the chimney. The worst case occurs during the coldest outside temperatures since the fireplace is always bringing in something like 1,000 cfm of air at say 0 degrees F, warming it by circulating it around the comparatively warm house and people, warming it even more in the fireplace, then immediately disposing of it up the chimney. To force yourself to fully appreciate what the fireplace is doing you should open a door or window (during winter). That is what is recommended by most fireplace experts anyway to make your average fireplace draw properly. There is a great net convective loss when operating an open fireplace. The only gain comes from radiant heat in line of sight from the flames and glowing coals. If you can tolerate cool indoor air temps then the open fireplace can result in a net gain in heat and comfort but only by keeping the surfaces of the house and people warm. This can work quite well in mild climates and even in somewhat more severe climates if the inevitable drafts are carefully planned for and if the fireplace is designed properly to maximize radiant heat output. If you have stood by a campfire at night you know that it can sort of keep you warm better than no fire at all. That's outdoor camping. An open fireplace in a house is indoor camping. The air temperature will be the same as it is outdoors except for little warm pockets where the radiant heat has been captured and the area protected from drafts. The old fashioned wingback chairs did just that. Obviously our ancestors got some heat out of them in some usefull manner, but back in the 1800s houses were drafty and central heat was unknown, so their expectations were different. I read accounts of winter farm living in central New York that indicated people woke up with snow that had drifted through cracks in the walls and built up on top of their bedcloths while they slept. One brave soul had to be the first up to start the fire. Everyone gathered around the fire to stay warm. It was better than the alternative.
It is not entirely the fault of fireplaces. We have gotten used to central heat to the point that we think you should be able to walk naked anywhere in the house. This would have been unbelievable even to royalty as recently as the 1800s. Also, the average fireplace of today is incredibly badly designed. Fireplace design reached a peak during the time of Count Rumford, a colonist faithfull to England during the colonial war period. He designed a fireplace that bears his name today that is very shallow and with a streamlined throat so you could reduce the ventilation loads to the minimum needed to get rid of the smoke while maximizing the radiant heat output. Think of putting a lamp at the back of the fireplace. How much light gets out of a deep low fireplace and where does it shine? It would hit a small spot on the opposite wall. That's where the only usefull heat would go too. The rest would warm the bricks of the fireplace, which are being conveniently cooled by the blast of air going up the chimney. The romans employed this method to cool their houses. Late in the day when it was cool outside they would build a fire in a specially designed fireplace, very deep with a small opening. It would suck the warm air out of the house without letting too much radiant heat into the house.
Before Rumford, when doctors routinely killed their patients by bleeding them too much, you couldn't really expect anyone to get this sort of thing right. After the Rumford period we started getting central heating, fireplaces became unpopular, and these lessons were forgotten. At some point fireplaces became some symbol of affluence and came back as a crude hole in the wall (an outside wall, another bad thing to do when designing a fireplace). Fireplaces are now what lowrider pick-up trucks are, ridiculous examples of conspicuous consumption whose glaring perversion of the original practical design seems to be part of the appeal.
I think fireplaces could work in Hawaii because of the mild temperatures but you can't just say "fireplace". Is it a properly built Rumford design? Are you building a tipi style fire in it so that the smoke leaking from the cut ends of the wood oozes out into the hottest part of the fire and is burned? Did you select the smallest size that would work and are you building the largest fires that the small fireplace will take? To do otherwise would be like idling a big V-8 engine in slow traffic, lots of waste.
I love open fireplaces and want to build a place with one in Puna (1,700'). Almost wish I was higher up so I had an excuse.
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thank you everyone for your opinions and experiences. now i know that both fireplaces and wood burning stoves are used up at the "higher" elevations. and, have learned that if i want to heat the house that maybe a wood burning stove would be more efficient?!
malia paha o lohe aku
perhaps they will hear
"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
w. james
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You can get a fireplace that has all the benefits of a freestanding wood stove and still looks quite traditional. They have glass doors to prevent heated air escaping, bring in outside air for combustion, and have vents (with or without a fan) for distributing the heat.
Has anyone in Puna used warm water solar for space heating? I'm toying with that idea. Will probably abandon it when costs are considered. The house would be in Ohia Estates at 3500 ft elevation.
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Way, I flubbed the subject previously, but nothing you would rely on should be solar, or wind for that matter. I'm about 3000' and 40 at night is usual. The metal freestanding stove with numerous venting options, and outside cold air intake with fans, are 95 % functional with minimum effluent. The ash is good soil ammendment. There is a metal isert that can be added to a stone fireplace to give it the same efficiency. All have glass viewing windows, which are self cleaning!
We laugh about smoke, but when it isn't blowing away in a neighborhood, burning fireplace can be banned tmmporarily!
Gordon J Tilley
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quote:
Originally posted by gtill
We laugh about smoke, but when it isn't blowing away in a neighborhood, burning fireplace can be banned tmmporarily!
gt: so it applies to both fireplaces and wood-burning stoves? the temporary banning? [?]
malia paha o lohe aku
perhaps they will hear
"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
w. james
Posts: 179
Threads: 5
Joined: Aug 2006
quote:
Originally posted by kani-lehua
gt: so it applies to both fireplaces and wood-burning stoves? the temporary banning? [?]
I wasn't aware of any restrictions in Hawaii. Here in California, the Bay Area has voluntary "Spare the Air" nights. The San Joaquin Valley has mandatory no burn nights. Neither place allows new fireplaces or woodstoves unless they are some newfangled expensive low-emission kind.
Oops. That wasn't addressed to me! I'll zip it now.
