One Hundred and Five Additional Reasons Your Fireplace May Not Work

In our previous article, Five Reasons Your Fireplace May Not Work Properly, we outlined five mistakes that will make a fireplace work improperly (if at all). Here we’ve got another 105 reasons why the fireplace may still not be working correctly.

Mistake One: Is your house energy efficient? Particularly in older homes, but in many homes, heat is lost through windows, attics, and just overall poor insulation. What most people don’t know is that this poor insulation doesn’t just mean you’ll lose heat, it means that your fireplace won’t function properly. Think about it: if your house is already losing a lot of heat, it’s already operating much in the same manner as a chimney. Thus, a burning fire has could easily vent out into the home instead of up the chimney, depending on how severe the energy loss is and the design of the chimney.

Mistake Two: Is your house too energy efficient? Alas, it seems like the design of homes must be met to the specifications of Goldilocks. A fire needs oxygen to burn, and a house that is too well designed (where there are no drafts and everything is sealed) won’t give enough fresh air to the fire. Though it sounds ridiculous, you might want to consider opening a window (at least briefly) if you notice your Gas Fireplace start to smoke.

Mistake Three: Where is your furnace? Furnaces operate in a similar fashion to fireplaces, in that they warm cool air. Furnaces pull in the cold air from the house and blow out warm air. Chimneys also allow the cold air from the house to escape, leaving just the warmth of the fire. If the furnace is too close to the fireplace, much like in mistake one, the fireplace can have trouble competing with the airflow from the furnace.

Mistake Four: Is your chimney in the right place? If the chimney is located on the outside of the house, meaning that it has at least one wall on the outside of the house, you may notice that sometimes your fireplace doesn’t work as well on extremely cold days. This is because the air inside the chimney will also be cold, and thus, not want to leave the house. Chimneys with more than one exposed wall will have even colder air inside of them, but this is a correctable problem. By starting with a small fire, you can essentially push this cold air out of the chimney so that air can flow freely once you have your large fire going.

Mistakes Five through One Hundred and Five: If you’ve paid attention to our first five mistakes from our other article, you probably noticed that the majority of the problems have to do with the design of the fireplace. Unfortunately, the design of the fireplace and how it will function in your home depends on a large number of variables, from the size and shape of the chimney to the size and shape of the home. If your chimney has been cleaned and still never seems to work right, you might want to consider either rebuilding it and the fireplace, or simply replacing the wood burning fireplace with a gas fireplace insert.

Five Reasons Your Fireplace May Not Work Properly

From time to time, we all make stupid mistakes. We’re human. Often, we tend to make mistakes particularly when we’re doing something that we don’t do on a regular basis – such as using the Fireplace
. The following mistakes are five common sense things that we might overlook the first time we build a fire during the winter.

Mistake One: Not using dry firewood! If you’re trying to burn freshly cut firewood, or if your firewood supply has been rained or snowed on, it’s not going to burn as well as dry firewood. Additionally, once wet wood finally starts to burn, it will produce more smoke, which in turn means there’s less oxygen for the fire to get going.

Mistake Two: Not opening the damper completely! Almost everyone has a story of forgetting to open the damper, or not opening it all the way. Don’t feel about this. In fact, a lot of the time the damper won’t open all the way because the chimney hasn’t been cleaned recently (after all, how often do we think about hiring a chimney sweep?).

Mistake Three: Having a dirty Chimney
! Besides affecting how completely you can open your damper, a dirty chimney dramatically alters the way your chimney performs. If your chimney doesn’t have a cap (the wire grate at the top), animals and all sorts of debris can make its way into your chimney. Additionally, even just the build up from multiple fires (or worse, multiple years of fires) means that the flow of air in your fireplace won’t function as it should.

Mistake Four: Was the chimney designed correctly? Unless you built your home, you don’t have as much control over this mistake as the others. A common problem of fireplaces is that the flue is not the right size. If it is too small, it won’t be able to vent efficiently – leaving you with an unpleasant extra amount of smoke in your home. By reducing the size of the hearth (by adding extra bricks or some other method) you can help correct for this problem.

Mistake Five: Was your chimney built correctly? Unfortunately, it’s possible to mess up the construction of a chimney in more than one way. A chimney has to be a certain height in order to function properly, and thus, if it was built too short you’re going to face a couple of problems: you can either keep it as is, and just deal with the extra smoke; you can hire a mason to make it taller; or you can install a gas fireplace insert and use the chimney to hide the vent pipe(s) for the fireplace insert.