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Is a Fireplace the Devil?

The mason showed up for the first time this week to go over the plan for building a Rumford.

I haven't told many people we're doing this. Well, I take that back. I've told a lot of people, and they're very excited. They think it's fabulous. Rumfords are my vote for ninth wonder of the world, right after my choice for eighth wonder, the backrub. Chum built a Rumford in his first house, Legare built two in his, and various other friends have them. You light your Rumford and sit down, preferably with an ounce of scotch in a glass, to ponder the hypnotic wall of fire before you.

For the uninitiated, the Rumford is a tall, shallow fireplace, developed in the late 1700s to throw more heat into a room and lose less heat up the chimney. The Rumford, named for its inventor Benjamin "Count Rumford" Thompson, became de rigueur in the early 1800s. (I love that there's a 2002 paper entitled "Contribution of Count Rumford to Domestic Life in Jane Austen's Time." Rumfords made a comeback in the 1970s thanks to a 1969 book by Vrest Orton, The Forgotten Art of Building a Good Fireplace, which both Chum and Legare used to build theirs.

For me, the question is not so much whether or not Orton misinterpreted the original Rumford design. For that, you can go to Rumford experts like Jim Buckley of Buckley Rumford Fireplaces.

Rather, it's why the green building movement attacks fireplaces as if they're the antichrist. I just don't mention mine when I'm talking to people in this field. The first time I tried to talk about our future Rumford with a rep from Energy Star, he said, "Oh, we're not too big on wood." I was at a great lecture on efficient building recently and during the discussion, the speaker described working with a client on her new house. "The only trouble is, she wanted a wood-burning fireplace. I tried and tried to explain things to her," he trailed off, shaking his head at his failure to convince her of her folly. Everyone in the hall sighed along with him.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Burning wood releases pollutants into the air and contributes to smog. Fireplaces are notoriously inefficient and can lose up to 90 percent of their heat up the chimney. Buckley maintains that a well-built Rumford operates at about 50 percent efficiency--though that's pretty bad compared to 92 percent for the new gas furnace we're getting.

Still, weighing these relative efficiencies seems a wrong-headed approach. Full disclosure: We also have a wood stove and frequently heat with it in the evenings. It may be less efficient than the furnace but when we use it, we keep the house cooler. "Rumfords" produce radiant heat. We can just sit closer to the stove and stay warm instead of heating up the whole space.

Besides, I think the green energy movement needs to take a more holistic view about what's really efficient. Here's a starter: I'll bet sitting in front of a blazing fire with a blanket over our legs is just as entertaining as watching a movie – but it uses a hell of a lot less energy than driving across town to the movie theater.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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Winning Heat

For probably the last six weeks I've been reading everything I could find on heating systems and re-reading stuff I'd read all year, trying to decide what to do.

Maybe it wouldn't be so hard if not for economics. After meeting with the heating and plumbing people, we leaned towards putting radiant heat on two floors. Friends have talked about how great it is, and we already have the tubing in place in the basement slab. And since our furnace stopped working this winter, it made sense to switch over from a propane forced hot air furnace to a hot water-based system. We could have an indirect hot water tank attached to it and get the benefit of more efficient and cheaper hot water. So we got estimates for radiant on two floors, radiant on one floor and hot water baseboard heat on the other, and baseboard heat on both floors.

I was gung ho and excited till the estimates came back: $25,000 for radiant on both floors, $17,400 for baseboard on both floors or radiant on the bottom floor and baseboard above. We went back and got a price for a new propane furnace and ductwork, which came to $9,500.

Way too many late-night conversations and popping aspirin followed. In the end, what helped most was Alex Wilson's book Your Green Home, one of the best general guides for the person like myself who needs help sorting out questions like these. I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of his argument was this: If you're investing in good insulation and windows, passive solar design, et cetera, you shouldn't need that much heat--so why are you spending a ton of money on a super-duper heating system?

He even posits that in a green house, radiant often isn't a good fit. Why? There are several reasons: One is that in a house like ours, with passive solar, you may only need heat periodically. But the radiant floors are relatively slow to heat up and cool down, so if it's cloudy and you turn up the heat, it may not warm up till it's already sunny again. In our case, it's even more of an issue, because the bottom floor is for our studies. We need something we can turn up when we're down there, and turn down when we leave. And I tend to like a room cooler than Chum does. That makes even a central propane system somewhat problematic. It's hard to steer the heat to just one spot with a furnace like this, since heat will leak around closed vents.

So what are we ending up with? The HVAC guys (and anybody thinking about resale value) no doubt think it's an odd choice--but I hope it's the right choice for us. For the main floor, we're putting in a smaller, high-efficiency (92 percent efficient) Bryant forced air propane furnace similar to what we had. Like with the old one, it'll also heat the upstairs--the heat rises up the staircase. We're also planning to put Rinnai vented propane space heaters in each study downstairs. That gives us more control over the individual offices, and we can keep them heated minimally when we're not using them.

I felt really good all week having decided this, though this morning when I woke up I started second guessing myself again. If we get solar hot water in the future, a hot water system would make so much sense, plus we'd already have the indirect water tank in place, and so on. My head is starting to swim all over again...

© The Green Guide, 2008

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Investigating Insulation

We had to take down the walls in the old section of the house to redo wiring and plumbing. It shouldn't be a surprise that a house built mostly from recycled materials should have continued its patchwork approach for the insulation too. So a run of fiberglass batt insulation morphs suddenly into solid foam and back to batts a few feet later. In some places the solid foam is 2", other places just 1". I found a fork in one spot, left over from a working lunch, I guess.

Bruce Torrey from Building Diagnostics (buildingdiagnosticshelp.com) showed up recently to do a walkthrough and help us figure out the best insulation to use since we've got a mix of old and new construction. Brief background—among other things, he trains insulation contractors, builders and others on various green building issues. Unlike some folks who've looked at our house, he didn't say, "You should have torn down this thing and started from scratch." I don't think the funkiness threw him a bit.

What we come up with is likely to be as patched together a group of insulation methods as Kim and Philippe employed. We're leaving as is the fiberglass batts and solid foam boards that are already in place. We're going to add some Thermax rigid board insulation to the inside walls of our old basement (it doesn't need to be sheetrocked over; you just glue it into place). Plus we'll probably use UltraTouch recycled denim insulation in some straightforward walls.

For the ceiling and some walls where it would be difficult to get the denim batts to fit very tightly, Bruce suggested we blow cellulose. For our purposes, it would work well and be significantly less expensive than either open or closed cell foam. He recommended David Evans at Renewal Energy Services (renewalenergyservices.com), an insulation contractor who recently did some Habitat for Humanity houses in this area. David came by today to scope out the job, and should have quotes within the week.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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