My great grandmother's house built in the 1860's has a Rumford style fireplace. It would freeze you to death when we used it when I was a kid. All of the heat went, unimpeded, straight up the chimney and out of the house while sucking cold air under the door sill. You are 100% correct that it creates a superior draft. It was more decorative than useful honestly, being that it was too shallow to really cook over and was inefficient for retaining heat. They installed another style of fireplace on the opposite wall at some point in the early 1900's and it works very well if you know how to operate it. I think it depends on what you're looking for. Do you want to stay warm and don't really care if your neighbors and the ceiling get a little smoke? Or do you just want an efficiently venting and burning fireplace and warmth be damned?
I find this fascinating. I always loved fireplaces and the different outward decorative design and materials but never knew about the inside, the most important part and how it truly all comes together and works efficiently or inefficiently.
In 35 years of building and 100s of fireplaces, not once have I had an inspector do more than glance at a fireplace. Nor do I know anyone who's had to make a correction due to a failed inspection. Not sure where this guy lives. Codes has become another form of tax collection just like everything else, but they haven't gotten to fireplaces yet. At least not here.
Funny thing some homes in the 60's actually used this design except it was made of bronze. And the fireplace was situated in the center of the house with the bronze pipes conducting the smoke under the ceiling to heat up the floor of the second story.
yea... keeping the heat from a fireplace (if at all possible) and circulating it around the house is the only strategy that makes sense but that is almost never done as you know. Today's madness is........ 98% of fireplaces are just burned for fun, and actually remove heat from the house. They are only for ambience and they cost the homeowner money each time they are lit. I would bet most people in the U.S. think a fireplace warms the home upa bit.
@@stoveadvice I am looking to convert a "Kentucky Semi Trailer" or perhaps a "Reefer Trailer" into a "very well insulated" tiny home so I can take it with when need be == so I can escape the mold where I am in now... Do you know anyone or do you do any consulting? I am worried most about trapped moisture/Condensation/"container rain" obviously due to my mold exposure experience... I have a lot of ideas and need to get something going within a few months or so... EDIT: I want to have a few different options for heat, like a fireplace, perhaps with a copper coil for optional backup water heating. In floor dual electric AND Hydronic radiant floor, and other options for off grid /alternate options to heat & cool. The idea with a Kentucky Trailer is to give the most option for insulating first and then all water tanks can be inside the "insulation envolpe and structure" (seen a lot of people with reefer or other that have spent a LOT to weld hangers and struggle to insulate and so on) Initially the thought is that this would allow access through false floor access panels (, obviously those areas would not be able to be floor heated with liquid heat for sure... One thought was with putting a double wall with a 1" space or whatever is ideal so that the: outer wall and inner wall/inner and outer ceiling/inner and outer floor envelope ...can move air with a dehumidifier setup to "guarantee" that no moisture gets trapped. Additional assist with small brushless computer fans to ensure dehumidified air gets evenly circulated. Don't want to have spray foam or foam board on the "inside" /inside wall due to offgassing since I already seem to be a hyper responder/canary in the coal mine to mold. However the outer wall could be spray foam or foam board on the outside (even though this would be exceeding the "width" for DOT requirements".... With a number of "reefer" trailers the skin on the inside is aluminum or stainless so one could use 100% silicone caulk to seal any seams to prevent OFFGASSING to interior... Also, considering using aluminum studs and mineral wool for inner wall, perhaps aluminum sheeting for wall surface instead of wood/tongue and groove wood. So that we are initially as mold resistant as possible. If you know anyone that might be able to offer perspective or other? I am in the Iowa. Obviously it would be great to just fix the home I am in, but it is not mine and the person who owns it has no cognitive ability to make decisions not formulate a plan to even reroof let alone address anything else...sad. But I can't change them and seems I need to walk away despite this is my mom. Narcissist/BPD/or other perhaps, but I have let go of all other family due to those kinds of things and it seems this is just how it is as painful as it is to watch.
The best fireplace I was ever around was in a very old house the homesteaders built. It's rear wall tilted inward at the top. I never looked up the flue to see if there was some other feature that made it work.
My understanding of the Rumford fire place is that the flue worked on the Bernoulli principle and the hearth was shallow and wide to provide a wider radiant heating area.
How about if you have a “insert.”? Would this make a difference? (You know, the devices that have “blowers” on them - that blow the hot air back into the room).
The whole fireplace theory is wrong. The house is a contained space. You have air that is heated roaring up the chimney. What replaces the air leaving the contained space (house)??? Of course, in order to balance the pressure inside the house, air is going to come back down the chimney blowing smoke into the house. Maybe log cabins were breezy enough that this didn't need to happen, but everything else is going to pull air down the chimney. Sure, you can create a vortex or something to exchange the smokey warm air going up with the cold clean air coming down, but that is a dumb way to address the problem. Chimneys need to be two walled separating the air coming down from the smokey, hot air going up, and adding some warmth to the air coming down creating a more efficient system.
Follow the Rumford recommends a gentle slope to the back of his fireplace ( I read his book) not sure why you don't have that in your diagram . I built one and it works great . The slope is gentle and very specific to proportions of the rest of the fireplace dimentions .
I don’t know a lot about fireplaces, but I am familiar with the story of the Rumford fireplace in comparison to the North American fireplace. And I do support and believe in the Romford style fireplace however, I think many of them have been built incorrectly, causing negative experiences. if my memory serves me correct count Rumford for a period of time lived in Massachusetts and he was building North American style fireplaces. He didn’t care for the United States nor did he care for the North American style of fireplace so he left and went back to Europe I could be wrong, but I believe it was Germany, he wound up in and honing his skills and building fireplaces. And that’s when he created the Rumford style fireplace.
I know I’m probably telling you things you already know well. Just letting you know that you’re not the only one who did a little bit of reading and quite frankly I did very little reading lol
I think they work great, but it depends on the application... cooking.... or using one to heat a "thermal mass" masonry heater. Check out my other videos on this channel. They answer your question.
I expect that a whole lot of this has to do with design lineage. From my understanding of the design, the rumford fireplace is pretty much good at exactly 1 thing - area heating. The problem is that, for most people, this was never useful and it's definitely an antiquated design now. Historically, it wasn't useful for a lot of people because it would be just awful to attempt to use one of these for cooking. If you were wealthy enough to have a house that required heating independent of the kitchen fire, it's useful. If you weren't, it just wasn't. Further, the idea was quickly made largely irrelevant due to cast iron stoves. They are just flatly better for both cooking and heating while being safer, and if you were wealthy enough to afford a house that needed heat independent of the kitchen fire, you probably upgraded to cast iron stoves pretty quickly. The popular design is more based around the aesthetics of a kitchen hearth. It wouldn't fly if people generally saw fireplaces as a utilitarian item, but they just don't.
Is it possible that the angled design was created to send more btu of heat into the building? Unlike Europe, houses here in the US are typically stick framed. So our houses not only are draftier, they lack the thermal mass effect and thus require more heat to be created. As a consequence of modern hermetic design, our houses here are very prone to “sick house syndrome”. A lot of it is unlearning things our traditional methods of construction carry into modern methods. Another oddity I’ve seen is chimneys with multiple fire places. Creating the cold plume would sort of act like a check valve in the air flow between floors. Who knows, I’m not one of them engineers. Just a guy who works on old houses.
the modern angle is simply from Design looks.. "U.S type of ideal bigger is better" Space and base area in this case, reducing the efficiency ... but hey our clients that know nothing on fire places will know this... $$$ modern design suck 100% and yes.. a fire place creates a 'draft' pulling the Dank air out of the home using the heat updraft
great information, but after a while you started rambling, and repeating the same information. this valuable informative video should have been 5 minutes long.
All fireplaces suck compared to a stove, they figured that out hundreds of years ago. If a chimney has a backdraft its because it was built incorrectly and not placed at the center high spot or peak of the roof.
I’ve felt that plenty, but everybody says that til they need the fire department. My local guys are great. They help out a lot of the smaller more rural towns that are mostly old people and can’t staff their own effectively too. We got brush fires in the northeast popping off, and I’m glad my little town has a well funded fire department.
The fact is government has helped improve many things, largely for everyone, but yes they certainly do use what they have made better to inordinately benefit their own, as can be expected; but to say they’re all bad is just as silly as saying they’re all good
So in the Old Houses of New England, the Fireplaces are a Brick & A Half Deep, even if you have it 6' wide or more for Cooking, and then the Opening is 4' to 5' tall, you Build the Fire out in the Room, as the Smoke goes up the Chimney and the Heat stays in the House, try and Build one of those with these College Edgumackated Igiots!
My great grandmother's house built in the 1860's has a Rumford style fireplace. It would freeze you to death when we used it when I was a kid. All of the heat went, unimpeded, straight up the chimney and out of the house while sucking cold air under the door sill. You are 100% correct that it creates a superior draft. It was more decorative than useful honestly, being that it was too shallow to really cook over and was inefficient for retaining heat. They installed another style of fireplace on the opposite wall at some point in the early 1900's and it works very well if you know how to operate it.
I think it depends on what you're looking for. Do you want to stay warm and don't really care if your neighbors and the ceiling get a little smoke? Or do you just want an efficiently venting and burning fireplace and warmth be damned?
failure to moderate the dampener and also it needed to be Rutherforized or have the ash-box partially open
Masonry heaters are also a very efficient way of heating with wood.
I am impressed with the disdain present. Very potent.
it's palpable lol
Uh oh, Matt bringing critique to the fireplace community. Just another sunny day with pigs and lipstick. Get a wood stove everyone.
Yep, and if you relocate, you can take your stove with you.
@@consuelaofthenorth4768 nothing says "do not buy" louder than walking into a living room with a hole in the roof and the stove missing.
I don’t understand this comment
I find this fascinating. I always loved fireplaces and the different outward decorative design and materials but never knew about the inside, the most important part and how it truly all comes together and works efficiently or inefficiently.
gelman amnesia
i love how pissed off this guy is. and he's right too, thats the kicker
In 35 years of building and 100s of fireplaces, not once have I had an inspector do more than glance at a fireplace. Nor do I know anyone who's had to make a correction due to a failed inspection. Not sure where this guy lives. Codes has become another form of tax collection just like everything else, but they haven't gotten to fireplaces yet. At least not here.
Funny thing some homes in the 60's actually used this design except it was made of bronze.
And the fireplace was situated in the center of the house with the bronze pipes conducting the smoke under the ceiling to heat up the floor of the second story.
yea... keeping the heat from a fireplace (if at all possible) and circulating it around the house is the only strategy that makes sense but that is almost never done as you know. Today's madness is........ 98% of fireplaces are just burned for fun, and actually remove heat from the house. They are only for ambience and they cost the homeowner money each time they are lit. I would bet most people in the U.S. think a fireplace warms the home upa bit.
@@stoveadvice I am looking to convert a "Kentucky Semi Trailer" or perhaps a "Reefer Trailer" into a "very well insulated" tiny home so I can take it with when need be == so I can escape the mold where I am in now...
Do you know anyone or do you do any consulting?
I am worried most about trapped moisture/Condensation/"container rain" obviously due to my mold exposure experience...
I have a lot of ideas and need to get something going within a few months or so...
EDIT: I want to have a few different options for heat, like a fireplace, perhaps with a copper coil for optional backup water heating. In floor dual electric AND Hydronic radiant floor, and other options for off grid /alternate options to heat & cool.
The idea with a Kentucky Trailer is to give the most option for insulating first and then all water tanks can be inside the "insulation envolpe and structure" (seen a lot of people with reefer or other that have spent a LOT to weld hangers and struggle to insulate and so on)
Initially the thought is that this would allow access through false floor access panels (, obviously those areas would not be able to be floor heated with liquid heat for sure...
One thought was with putting a double wall with a 1" space or whatever is ideal so that the: outer wall and inner wall/inner and outer ceiling/inner and outer floor envelope ...can move air with a dehumidifier setup to "guarantee" that no moisture gets trapped. Additional assist with small brushless computer fans to ensure dehumidified air gets evenly circulated.
Don't want to have spray foam or foam board on the "inside" /inside wall due to offgassing since I already seem to be a hyper responder/canary in the coal mine to mold.
However the outer wall could be spray foam or foam board on the outside (even though this would be exceeding the "width" for DOT requirements"....
With a number of "reefer" trailers the skin on the inside is aluminum or stainless so one could use 100% silicone caulk to seal any seams to prevent OFFGASSING to interior...
Also, considering using aluminum studs and mineral wool for inner wall, perhaps aluminum sheeting for wall surface instead of wood/tongue and groove wood. So that we are initially as mold resistant as possible.
If you know anyone that might be able to offer perspective or other?
I am in the Iowa.
Obviously it would be great to just fix the home I am in, but it is not mine and the person who owns it has no cognitive ability to make decisions not formulate a plan to even reroof let alone address anything else...sad. But I can't change them and seems I need to walk away despite this is my mom. Narcissist/BPD/or other perhaps, but I have let go of all other family due to those kinds of things and it seems this is just how it is as painful as it is to watch.
The best fireplace I was ever around was in a very old house the homesteaders built. It's rear wall tilted inward at the top. I never looked up the flue to see if there was some other feature that made it work.
My understanding of the Rumford fire place is that the flue worked on the Bernoulli principle and the hearth was shallow and wide to provide a wider radiant heating area.
Applaud this man!
How about if you have a “insert.”?
Would this make a difference?
(You know, the devices that have “blowers” on them - that blow the hot air back into the room).
The whole fireplace theory is wrong. The house is a contained space. You have air that is heated roaring up the chimney. What replaces the air leaving the contained space (house)??? Of course, in order to balance the pressure inside the house, air is going to come back down the chimney blowing smoke into the house. Maybe log cabins were breezy enough that this didn't need to happen, but everything else is going to pull air down the chimney. Sure, you can create a vortex or something to exchange the smokey warm air going up with the cold clean air coming down, but that is a dumb way to address the problem. Chimneys need to be two walled separating the air coming down from the smokey, hot air going up, and adding some warmth to the air coming down creating a more efficient system.
Follow the Rumford recommends a gentle slope to the back of his fireplace ( I read his book) not sure why you don't have that in your diagram . I built one and it works great .
The slope is gentle and very specific to proportions of the rest of the fireplace dimentions .
I don’t know a lot about fireplaces, but I am familiar with the story of the Rumford fireplace in comparison to the North American fireplace. And I do support and believe in the Romford style fireplace however, I think many of them have been built incorrectly, causing negative experiences. if my memory serves me correct count Rumford for a period of time lived in Massachusetts and he was building North American style fireplaces. He didn’t care for the United States nor did he care for the North American style of fireplace so he left and went back to Europe I could be wrong, but I believe it was Germany, he wound up in and honing his skills and building fireplaces. And that’s when he created the Rumford style fireplace.
I know I’m probably telling you things you already know well. Just letting you know that you’re not the only one who did a little bit of reading and quite frankly I did very little reading lol
Count Rumsford lives on!
Nice work!
"I'd rather be stacking and unstacking a 1000 pounds of bricks in my back yard all day, than putting up with NOTNILC" -Muuuuaaaattt ;)
I had a liner put inside my chimney and it works very well. What do you think about rocket mass heaters?
I think they work great, but it depends on the application... cooking.... or using one to heat a "thermal mass" masonry heater. Check out my other videos on this channel. They answer your question.
I expect that a whole lot of this has to do with design lineage.
From my understanding of the design, the rumford fireplace is pretty much good at exactly 1 thing - area heating. The problem is that, for most people, this was never useful and it's definitely an antiquated design now.
Historically, it wasn't useful for a lot of people because it would be just awful to attempt to use one of these for cooking. If you were wealthy enough to have a house that required heating independent of the kitchen fire, it's useful. If you weren't, it just wasn't.
Further, the idea was quickly made largely irrelevant due to cast iron stoves. They are just flatly better for both cooking and heating while being safer, and if you were wealthy enough to afford a house that needed heat independent of the kitchen fire, you probably upgraded to cast iron stoves pretty quickly.
The popular design is more based around the aesthetics of a kitchen hearth. It wouldn't fly if people generally saw fireplaces as a utilitarian item, but they just don't.
Ive always hated my fireplace, and now i know why
In the smoke chamber the brick would be cooler allowing the creosote a surface to condense on?
Heated with a wood stove for 25 yrs.....i agree!
Is it possible that the angled design was created to send more btu of heat into the building? Unlike Europe, houses here in the US are typically stick framed. So our houses not only are draftier, they lack the thermal mass effect and thus require more heat to be created.
As a consequence of modern hermetic design, our houses here are very prone to “sick house syndrome”. A lot of it is unlearning things our traditional methods of construction carry into modern methods. Another oddity I’ve seen is chimneys with multiple fire places. Creating the cold plume would sort of act like a check valve in the air flow between floors. Who knows, I’m not one of them engineers. Just a guy who works on old houses.
Why would a modern stick framed, Tyvek sheathed double glazed windowed home be drafty unless it was build like crap?
@@catsupchutney I understand what you’re saying but your answer doesn’t really help us understand why we build fireplaces in such manner.
I was on the floor when he said "end Thanksgiving early".
Try a rocket mass heater. ALL the heat, none of the smoke, 1/3 the wood.
Cant wait to get home and check out my fireplace. The house was built in 1926. Hopefully its a Rumford Design
At least 30% of new homes don't even have fireplaces, alot of older fireplaces need work and are unusable
the modern angle is simply from Design looks..
"U.S type of ideal bigger is better" Space and base area in this case, reducing the efficiency ... but hey our clients that know nothing on fire places will know this... $$$ modern design suck 100%
and yes.. a fire place creates a 'draft' pulling the Dank air out of the home using the heat updraft
great information, but after a while you started rambling, and repeating the same information. this valuable informative video should have been 5 minutes long.
ahh I think you were just getting your second wind ... this time tell us how you really feel !
Great video man.
This is great content. Thank you
All fireplaces suck compared to a stove, they figured that out hundreds of years ago. If a chimney has a backdraft its because it was built incorrectly and not placed at the center high spot or peak of the roof.
Tell us about the notnilc dammit!
love it
Everything government touches, turns to shit.
Because it's owned by the elite.
I’ve felt that plenty, but everybody says that til they need the fire department. My local guys are great. They help out a lot of the smaller more rural towns that are mostly old people and can’t staff their own effectively too. We got brush fires in the northeast popping off, and I’m glad my little town has a well funded fire department.
The fact is government has helped improve many things, largely for everyone, but yes they certainly do use what they have made better to inordinately benefit their own, as can be expected; but to say they’re all bad is just as silly as saying they’re all good
😂😂😂 you're funny
I'll stick to generations of Union training.
Anyone who builds a fireplace inside a home in 2024 is a terrible design.
So in the Old Houses of New England, the Fireplaces are a Brick & A Half Deep, even if you have it 6' wide or more for Cooking, and then the Opening is 4' to 5' tall, you Build the Fire out in the Room, as the Smoke goes up the Chimney and the Heat stays in the House, try and Build one of those with these College Edgumackated Igiots!