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“This is how northern Europeans heat their homes,” Ginsberg says. “They think we’re silly for using central heat.”
| | | |  | |  | | | | | 5 Fireplace Safety Tips
If it’s installed and used properly, a fireplace can give a family many years of safe, happy use. Of the fires that do start in a fireplace or chimney, two-thirds of them are the result of failure to clean the chimney.
“About a quarter of Americans report using a fireplace as an alternative heat source, but more than half don’t clean their chimney once a year,” says Meri-K Appy, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Home Safety Council. “If you use the fireplace a lot, it’s especially important.”
Chimneys should be cleaned by a professional technician. Visit the Chimney Safety Institute of America to find certified local technicians. The technician will clean built-up creosote, the oily product of combustion, and look for cracks in the lining of the chimney that might allow fire to get inside the walls of your home.
Here are other important fireplace safety measures:
• Install a carbon monoxide detector in your home.
• Put wire mesh on top of your chimney to keep out birds and pests.
• In wood-burning fireplaces, burn only seasoned hardwood—some types of wood such as pine have too much resin or moisture in them—or tested alternative fuels.
• Consider installing doors on a wood-burning fireplace. “A screen can still permit little embers through,” Appy says. “With glass doors, you can still enjoy the fire and protect your room from sparks or embers popping out.”
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Los Angeles-based builder Janna Levenstein has fallen in love the Australian EcoSmart fireplace, a fireplace that burns denatured alcohol, a renewable fuel source, and can be built into any space.
“Anyone can have a fireplace now,” she says. “Someone who is renting an apartment could have a fireplace and take it with them when they leave.”
Levenstein has one in her own home and uses it all the time, she says. She likes that it’s very low maintenance—“you just like the thing like a candle,” she says—and that she’s not putting smoke into the air. The difference from a fire from wood logs, she says, is in the feel. “It doesn’t feel like a roaring yummy fire,” she says. “It’s more slick and hip, and it burns a blue flame rather than yellow.”
For homeowners who equate a fireplace with the cheery crackle of burning wood and smoke rising from the chimney instead of flipping a switch or opening a valve, Kaufman notes that the fireplace industry has transitioned over the last several years from wood to gas products.
One major reason for that switch is pollution control. Many large metropolitan areas are out of compliance with federal regulations for air quality. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, wood smoke can account for up to 80 percent of the particulate matter emissions in residential areas during typical wood-heating seasons. As a result, some municipalities ban the use of fireplaces on days when the air quality is poor.
There’s a benefit to homeowners, though, Kaufman says. Research at Lennox found that people with open-front, wood-burning fireplaces only use them about a dozen times a year. Owners with gas fireplaces use them as much as 160 times a year. “It goes from the peripheral to the center of the home almost every night,” he says.
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Text by Pat Curry
© 2008 BobVila.com
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