Whether or not to put a chimney in the house has been a topic of discussion for a time. The debate that follows will examine the advantages of having a chimney in an effort to put this issue to rest.
This article will assist you in making the best choice if you are one of the people who has been debating whether or not to have a chimney.
Let’s Dive In!!!
Why Should You Have Chimney on Front of House
Efficiency of Cost
A chimney is a cost-effective addition to a kitchen since it offers numerous financial advantages that you might not have previously considered. A chimney’s main function is to exhaust smoke and other byproducts of wood burning from your home. Through the same chimney, fresher, cooler air is being brought into the home while the smoke is being expelled.
By using the air conditioner less frequently, you’ll spend much less each month on energy costs. Additionally, it keeps your walls and ceiling clean, preventing the need for frequent repainting, which is expensive. Now that you know this, you have an excellent excuse to build a chimney in your home.
A Tidier Home
The elimination of the offensive smoke created by the fireplace is one of the key reasons you should construct a chimney in your new home. Without a chimney, soot, fire embers, and smoke particles would adhere to the walls of the room, turning them black and making them quite ugly.
The soot would eventually react with the humidity to create unattractive grease, which would discolor the walls. As a result, you would need to repaint your walls frequently, which is expensive, especially when operating on a tight budget.
Furthermore, when guests come over, dirty, soiled walls provide a really terrible picture of you.
Enhanced Safety for You and Your Family
Hot gases, including carbon monoxide, are produced by your cooktop and the wood burning in your fireplace during cooking activities like deep-frying. In addition, the burning of wood results in the production of grease and soot.
Inhaling these heated gases, especially carbon monoxide, is a serious health concern because it competes with oxygen in the body and, in high amounts, can cause suffocation and death. A chimney around the fireplace and in the kitchen can assist remove hot gases and grease and replace them with fresher, cooler air.
Beauty Appeal
Some claim that since they have an electric chimney or hardly ever use the fireplace, a brick chimney, for instance, is not required. While this couldn’t be further from the truth, a brick chimney also has other advantages that you might not have known about.
The aesthetic attractiveness of the materials used to construct chimneys, particularly brick, cannot be exchanged for anything. The value of your home is increased by the sleek stainless steel appearance and feel of an electric chimney as well.
It gives the fireplace and kitchen a refined and classy appearance, which pays off handsomely when you decide to sell the house.
Ensures Your Kitchen’s Durability
The majority of people build or purchase their homes in the anticipation that they would endure. Sadly, some homes do not endure as long for a variety of reasons. The heat generated by the stovetop when heavy-duty cooking is one of the many causes.
Without a chimney, the hot gases would cause damage to your walls and floor tiles, possibly shortening their lifespan. This is most noticeable in the kitchen, where the floor tiles lack a sealer.
What function does a chimney serve?
The chimney’s main purpose is to divert smoke away from the stove and outside the building. The stove must also: Ensure that there is sufficient air sucked into the stove to allow for a clean burn of the fire.
Why do Chimneys Need to be Outside the House?
Only the top of the chimney needs to be outside the building because it is this part of the chimney that exhales smoke and other gases into the air; if it weren’t outside the building, smoke and other gases would be expelled into the house, seriously endangering people’s health.
However, just the chimney needs to be outside; the fireplace and chimney breast can be located anywhere.
In the UK, there are terraces of hundreds of homes, each with a central fireplace and other features.
They are not REQUIRED to be outside the house. However, they were frequently created as structural components of an outer wall.
The chimney would be a part of that building because the majority of stone or mason dwellings had their fireplaces on outside load bearing walls.
They are not needed to be, though.
Should Houses Have Chimneys?
A mechanism to vent the combustion products is required in every home with a combustion equipment. A vent is required for any furnace, water heater, or clothes dryer that uses fuel (coal, oil, natural gas, wood, etc.).
For several hundred years, brick chimneys were the primary method of achieving that. Since furnaces and water heaters are currently considerably more energy-efficient, less heat needs to be vented, hence vent systems frequently consist of plastic pipe exiting through a side wall. No need for a chimney.
There are ornamental gas fireplaces that advertise being “vent-free,” however this just leads to the release of more harmful combustion products into the living area, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor. Not a wise move. A fireplace should be vented to the outside if you desire one.
Do New Houses Still Have Chimneys?
The ensuing gaseous exhaust from a heating system or furnace that employs combustion to generate heat must be evacuated outside the building.
It may not appear like the conventional stone or brick chimney you’re picturing, which stands up over the roofline, but many new houses’ “chimneys” are really built of PVC tubing and vent through the side of the house a few feet above grade (ground level).
Is a chimney a bad idea for a house design?
If there is no insulation between the part of the chimney that is outside the insulation envelope and the inside part of the chimney, it is a terrible design if there is a column of cold air (with no cap to close) inside the house or if there is a continuous thermal bridge between inside and outside.
The fact that lighting a fire in a fireplace rather than a stove can be a dreadful waste of fuel in a home heated by another fuel should also be known to more people (oil, gas, electricity). Whatever mechanism was used to heat the air, a significant amount of it goes up a chimney unless the fireplace is fed air from outside.
