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A comment on What went wrong with the Texas power grid?. Parent comment

Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by ip26 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @07:56PM (#26161178)
Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small.

The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace, firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.

It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by forgotmypw17 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:22PM (#26161407)
This is why russian-style stoves have a whole labyrinth for the air to blow through, warming up the large brick structure. It can hold heat for a while even after it's done burning.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by nickt on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:32PM (#26161490)
A bit OT, but I would have no idea about Russian-style stoves until I saw this video a few days ago. Amazing.

https://youtu.be/r_TO30jzyUA

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by treis on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @10:03PM (#26162148)
Even worse, all that exhaust gas that goes up the chimney has to be replaced. And it's replaced by cold air from the outside coming through all the little books and crannies of your house.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by _carbyau_ on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @10:51PM (#26162436)
I have seen slow combustion fireplaces still drawing in air from the room in front of them, leading to your exact comment.

Seems like it could be fixed with a simple design change.

But I am not a fireplace lawyer so I won't profess to know.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by treis on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @10:09AM (#26167122)
There are many different designs that have tried to solve the issue. Both from capturing the heat lost up the chimney and supplying combustion air from outside. They all come with downsides and ultimately forced air heating won out.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by User23 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @09:19PM (#26161829)
The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before going to bed you have a column of brick radiating throughout the night. It’s still pretty chilly in the morning but it works quite well.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by ip26 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @09:23PM (#26161871)
Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is why that went away (or so I've heard)
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by tharkun__ on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @10:04PM (#26162154)
https://www.offgridquest.com/fload/homes-dwellings/heating-c...

Almost without comment. All I will say is that we have some friends in Germany living in the 'countryside' (as much as that's still a thing in densely populated Germany) that heat their main living area with one of these (way less elaborate design lol). My grandma had one of these sitting in the wall between kitchen (right next to the eating area) and the living room.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by cycomanic on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @12:49AM (#26163165)
My parents have one of these in their holiday house by the sea (essentially an old farmhands dwelling). I can confirm that it heats the house up to blistering temperature even in the coldest winter if one wants. Other friends use a more modern design in their house which essentially heats up the whole house (I don't think they have any other heating except water heating)
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by gowld on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:08PM (#26161285)
Why don't we run radiator water pipes across the chimney, to bring that heat back to the house?
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by ag56 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @09:01PM (#26161696)
The house I grew up in in Scotland did exactly this.

We had fireplace powered central heating -— radiators throughout the house linked to pipes behind the firebox. In the morning I’d wake up to ice on the inside of the windows, and by my teenage years it was my job to head downstairs and light the coal fire first thing in the morning. It worked well once the fire was up and running.

This was in the ‘90s btw, I’m not _that_ old.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by mbreese on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:28PM (#26161459)
This is a very old problem and there are solutions, like the Franklin stove [1]. However, we don’t really use fireplaces as a primary source of heat anymore. Their use is really more decorative. If they were really intended for heat generation, so one of the other posts mentioned, we would use a completely different design.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_stove

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by maxerickson on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:44PM (#26161572)
Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing for heating water with the minimum required fuel.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by Jtsummers on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:27PM (#26161448)
There are designs that do this or things like it. In the US, though, it seems fireplaces are mostly an aesthetic feature and not a practical one.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by mikestew on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:38PM (#26161542)
My father did that a long time ago in a house that had baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe, ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or not.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by tharkun__ on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @10:17PM (#26162229)
In parts of Europe (definitely Germany) heating with water based radiators throughout the house is normal. And that goes from individual houses to big apartment complexes (I lived in a 52 unit one with a central furnace). It's totally normal to let the air out of your radiator from time to time. And they (or you in the individual house case) fill up the water in the 'closed' system from time to time.

Different places, different 'customs' i.e. systems we are used to. All have their pros and cons and sometimes it's just that we don't know that different systems exist.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by cycomanic on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @01:04AM (#26163245)
Radiative heat actually makes you feel significantly warmer, so you can set your heating to a lower temperature and still feel the same warmth compared to airflow heating. This is the reason why floor heating is very efficient, because you have a large heat mass with radiative heat that sits at your feet (which typically get cold first). So it provides the same comfortlevel at significantly lower temperature.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by saberdancer on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @05:04AM (#26164720)
Which is why it is better to make a quick but strong draft in your home than keep window constantly slightly open. With a quick exchange of air, your walls remain warm and continue to radiate heat. Having a window constantly slightly open means air exchange is slow but constant and the area of the wall around the window cools down significantly.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by Bayart on Thursday February 18, 2021 @02:30AM (#26177018)
Same in France. There's variations in how the water's heated (gas, fuel oil, electricity) but it's the default form of heating everywhere.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by throwaway0a5e on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @09:21PM (#26161851)
It takes very, very specific conditions (you'd have to go out of your way to minimize radiant heat transfer) for a fireplace to put less heat into a room than it removes with airflow.

Back in the day (i.e. 1700s) everyone heated with fireplaces. And many of them (e.g. 2nd floor ones) weren't that big.

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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by ihaveajob on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @09:47PM (#26162065)
The problem, in my experience (grew up spending significant time in a 3 story country house made of stone with only one fireplace for heating), is that it gets warm close to the fire and whatever is touching the chimney, but the rest of the house gets colder because of the cold air drawn in by the fire. So very likely a net gain, but depending on where you sleep, it could get interesting at night.
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Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid? by dwohnitmok on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @08:00PM (#26161216)
Ah the only heat exchange being radiant makes total sense. Thanks!
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