Stuff You Should Know - How Fireplaces Work

Episode Date: November 15, 2016

They are dirty, harmful to your health, bad for the environment and utterly charming. Wood-burning fireplaces have been with us for centuries and, despite their many drawbacks, are sticking around. Learn more than you thought possible about the fireplace. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Make your business official with Google and Squarespace. When you create a custom domain and a beautiful business website with Squarespace, you'll receive a free year of business email and professional tools from Google.

It's the simplest way to look professional online. Visit squarespace.com slash Google to start your free trial. Use the offer code WORKS, W-O-R-K-S, for 10% off your first purchase, Google and Squarespace. Make it professional, make it beautiful. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant

and Jerome the Jairs. So this is Stuff You Should Know. Jerry got a piece of mail the other day that said Jerome. Oh, yeah? Yeah, like real mail, though, right, Jerry? Yeah, I don't know how that happened. Oh, like mail mail, not like fan mail? Oh, little Jerry just said confirmed.

Weird. We've been doing a lot of this Jerry translating lately. Yeah. That's really weird. That's bizarre. I mean, I sold your address to a mailing list, but I've never been reimbursed for it. So, how are you, sir?

Great. We are fresh off our live shows in Boston, Mass. Right, Ma. And Washington, D.C. And big thanks to everyone that came out. Those were a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure. And thanks to the brightest young things

for having us to the Benson Ball with Tignitaro. Yeah, it was wonderful. We got to meet TIG. She was just as nice and non-plus as I would have hoped. Exactly. She didn't make a fuss. No. Nor should she.

Wait. I mean that in a good way. Wait, isn't non-plus the opposite of what you think it means? I don't know. I think non-plus means like you're agitated. Means you're plus? Yeah. I've learned things all the time on this show.

Yeah, me too. This is my favorite part of my job. And most specifically, the most recent thing I've learned, Chuck, is that fire, the use of fire, the technological application of fire, that's as far as I'm going, actually predates humanity. That it was Homo erectus,

who was the first upright hominid who controlled fire. And it was as long ago as a million years. There's evidence of the use, the controlled use of fire by humans as much as a million years ago. Yeah, it says here in this article that you found that in China, there are hearths of clay, silt and limestone from like a half a million years ago,

and signs like you said in Africa over a million years ago that people, and these are in caves, so essentially an indoor fireplace. Right, yeah, but. And if you are an anthropologist, you are familiar with the term hearth, but that's usually used to describe something that doesn't really resemble the hearth

that we'll talk about today. Usually it's like just a shallow depression. Maybe it did have some limestone or some clay or something else to keep it from catching fire, but nothing like the fireplaces we know of today. The ones we see and say, there's a fireplace, they're actually about 700-ish years old. Yeah, and I think the history of the chimney

isn't super clear, but by the 14th century and of course Europe, when you had a little dough, you could then afford the nice chimney or maybe just any chimney. Well actually, yeah, people started to afford chimneys quite a bit. Especially in say Jolly Old London, there was a lot of chimneys that sprung up.

Yeah, they weren't happy about it, right? A lot of problems that arose as we'll see later on. But yeah, it's kind of interesting to see the fireplace hasn't really changed much in like 700 years. And then you step back and you're like, no, actually that's kind of evident when you think about the fireplace and how ridiculously inefficient it is.

Yeah, it's kind of changed. I don't know, it depends on what your definition of changed. Hole in the wall with a hole above it that's tall and narrow and leads to the outside. Yeah, within that there have been a lot of changes. Sure, sure, but the overall general design has been relatively unchanged for 700 years.

It's like toilet paper. Yeah, they're not as straight as they used to be. Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life about when, you know, he was just the kind of person who would look around the world in his everyday surroundings and say, why do people do it like this? That's stupid.

I'm Ben Franklin. There's better ways. Listen to me. Right. Take a peek under my silken robe. Sure. He very famously wrote that on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

But fireplaces used to get under his skin apparently because of the design and we're gonna talk about this. The traditional fireplace is fairly wasteful. Oh, tremendously so. And it can even make your room colder. Yes, which is counterintuitive. Yeah. It's like non-plus.

Yeah. I looked that up, by the way. So non-plus, I'm correct. The non-plus means you're agitated. Well, it means that you are surprised and confused to the point that you are unsure how to react. So not necessarily agitated. Okay, gotcha.

But you're definitely not just laid back. No, so Tignitar was not non-plus. She was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which was, hi, nice to meet you. Yeah, hey, how's it going? Yeah, she's just chill. Right.

And very sweet. Yeah. I didn't expect some big show, trust me, for anybody that meets us. Well, no. So I just want to put that out there. I didn't want to sound like I was disappointed. She didn't throw those snap crackers

and start tap dancing. No, I got exactly what I wanted, which was a very nice lady who gave me a big hug and a photo. I think that's come across. Yeah, I'm sensitive to that stuff. Once I start opening my mouth, digging that hole. Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean? Here's a little more rope. Anyway, let me give you a stat here. Wait, first, I think everyone wants to hear about how you felt when you met Tignitaro. I was super excited, can you tell? How was she? So here's a little stat for you.

The National Association of Home Builders did a survey. And I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of 77% of home buyers say, and that's, I guess. In the US. Yeah, like even in, I mean, that's accounting for the hot places as well.

Sure. So I would imagine in the cold places, it's probably more like 100%. Yeah, well, remember, I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about how in New York, it's very gauche these days to have a fireplace that you use because it's so wasteful.

Now does gauche mean what I think it means? Now I'm doubting everything. It means super laid back and non-plus. Oh, so like New Yorkers are like, oh, you have a fireplace? Yes. How not green? Right.

Which I mean, they're correct. There's a lot of ungreenness associated with fireplaces. Brownness. Sure. You know? Especially as far as like air pollution goes, air quality, there's a lot of problems. Sure, there's a lot of problems that come out of it.

Like for example, I guess if we're gonna talk about this for a second. If you are a kid and you have, I don't know, respiratory diseases, you're far likelier to be living in a house where your folks burn wood. So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be brought on because smoke's gonna get in the room

no matter how great the fireplace is. Right, or if you're, let's say, if you already have asthma or something, you're not doing yourself any favors by letting that smoke in the particles, particulate matter creep in there. Yeah, and also I mean like house fires, there's like 25,000 house fires

in the United States every year that result in like 10 people's deaths. Yeah, from directly from fireplaces. Yeah. But no matter who you talk to for the most part, people say, still worth it. Like yeah, I'm gonna die of like black long and my house may burn down before I get a chance too,

but I really love fires in the winter and I'm willing to take that risk. So you know my deal, or do you? I don't know. We live in a house that was built in 1935. Oh yeah, yeah. And we're renovating it still forever. Yes.

We have the fireplace that is not used. I know. And it's not able to be used. I know. Unless we pay like some pretty good dough to get it retrofitted and the chimney worked on. And I for years have been leaving just little sticky notes and I'll write it in crayon on the bathroom wall

and just little things like, hey, M, how about that fireplace? Mm-hmm. And she says quit writing on the walls. Right. We're not getting a fireplace just yet. But maybe. You've been there for like 10 years.

When is, when does our life, when do we start living our life? Is my question with a fireplace. Have you considered trading something she wants for the fireplace? It doesn't work. Like that. No.

Okay. Have you considered begging? That didn't work either. Oh wow. Yeah. I don't know what to tell you. Well, I mean, you know what I do. I wait till she goes out of town and I just do it yourself.

Yeah. But do it in trouble. In a terrible way so that somebody's a professionalist to come in and go behind you. Yeah. And then they have no choice. You're like, I gotta get the fireplace guy in here now. There's a giant hole in the wall. Long story short though,

we still don't have a fireplace and I'm still, despite all the negatives, and I try to lead a green life, but I just, I want that wood burning thing. I don't want, we'll talk about the substitutes, but, and that's great if you're into that because they are better in many, many ways. Sure.

But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. Yeah. I don't want that particulate matter on my lungs. You and 77% of US homeowners. Yeah. So yeah, most people do say, I'm willing to look past the problems for a wood burning fireplace.

But like you say, there are alternatives. That's right. But we're gonna talk about all of it here. Should we talk about the parts? Yeah, let's talk about, this is when I say like there was very little change to the design over 700 years ago. It's true, man.

Yeah, I didn't realize some of these parts existed. So I did learn quite a bit in this. I thought it was pretty much the firebox and the flu that ran up the chimney. Sure. And that's it. Right. But there's more to it than that.

Well, yeah, these are, I think these are the improvements that came over time. So you do have that hearth that you mentioned that's gonna be built out of something fireproof. You don't want a wood to hearth. No, that'd be bad. It's probably rock or brick. And that's where you-

Paper mache. Yeah. That's where you sit and drink your bourbon while you warm your back. It's like an apron on the floor that extends out from the fireplace. Yeah, and it can be even with the floor, as is the case now, or the one I grew up with,

I grew up with one of those Mac Daddy huge rock-stone fireplaces. Those ones are like, man. And you could sit on the thing. They're the best. They are the best, but they're also like, just kid killers they look like, you know? Well, not if you don't climb in it.

Oh, okay. Which I never did. Yeah, that is pretty nice. What else you got? Well, so you know, like the hearth extends out, but if you look usually up the walls along either side of the hole in the wall and then above it, above it, that's called the surround.

It's usually made of something either that's the same as the hearth, same material as the hearth or some other fireproof thing like tile or brick or stone. Right. And that's just to basically prevent that fire from licking out of the firebox and setting the house on fire.

Right, so straw, no good. No. As a material. Right. You have your firebox. That is just what you think it is. That's the square, typically. Although they're shaped a little differently now.

That's the square that holds your fire. Right. And it's where the smoke starts to collect. Yes. What you're sending this stuff up to behind the firebox is actually called the smoke chamber. And there's a transition area in between the firebox, which is where you actually have the fire,

and the smoke chamber, which is above and slightly behind it. And it's called the throat. It's the opening that connects those two things. And the smoke chamber, smoke box, I think I've been calling it, it actually connects the firebox to the flue. And it's got some pretty cool stuff going on. This is where some improvements were made to the design.

Yeah, and the flue is surrounded by the chimney. Also, again, not straw. Right. It's gonna be brick, almost always. In the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf. Yeah, it's concave. Yeah, because if you look at a fireplace,

you just think it just goes straight back and up, right? Well, some of the old designs did. Well, they were stupid. Yeah, that's how it's changed some. Right, so if you go, if you look at the back of the fireplace, if you could stick your head up into the firebox. You don't want to do that.

When there's no fire. You don't want to do it, period. You'll see that there's actually a shelf up there. And it's angled forward, too, in front of that. Like I said, it used to be just sort of a cube, and it went straight up. Now it's sort of zigzags. Yeah.

Back and forth a little bit on its way to the flue. That's right. So the whole point of that shelf and the zigzag is so that when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. Yeah. It's almost basically a protective overhang. And it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff

from falling into the firebox, too. Correct. That smoke shelf underneath it, you're going to have the damper. And that is that covering that's movable, and that separates the firebox from the place above it. And that keeps, when you don't have your fire, that's when you close.

We used to say close the flue. Right. And we didn't use the word damper in my house. Yeah. I don't know why. But that's technically what it is. It's the damper. And you get your, there are different mechanisms,

but ours had a little, little eyelet circle thing that you would stick, we used our fire poker. And we would just unhook it and then close the damper. And that when your fire's not burning, you want to keep that thing open when it's burning, obviously. Well, yeah. You're going to find out really quickly.

Yeah. If it's closed. It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure. You know. It's got a throat, why not? Sure. What else do we have?

Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the flue. Yeah, I hadn't heard of this. They could close too. It's unnecessary. Oh, you think? Sure. But then at the very top of the chimney,

there's something called spark arrestor, which is usually like some sort of mesh grate that will allow like gas and air out, but will keep little embers and stuff from going out onto your roof and setting your house on fire. Yeah, especially like paper tends to float up and out. The chimney cap, it serves the same purpose. And that a lot of times is one in the same.

Like the chimney cap and the spark arrestor all one piece a lot of times. Right. Is that it? I haven't heard of this ash dump. That sounds pretty neat though. Sure. It's basically, I guess a hatch in the floor.

Right. Where you can just sweep the ashes. I guess that sounds like in the olden days. Right. When your house was built on to bricks and it would just drop into a bucket below as would your poop. Sure.

There were different buckets under your house that collected things. Do you want to make sure you knew which bucket you were grabbing at any given time? That's right. You didn't want a surprise. And then finally got your little door. It's either glass or metal or it might just be a screen.

We never had, in mind growing up, we never had the glass door seen. Sure. Just the screen. We had one of those in my high school house. It was a, we had a gas fireplace. Yeah. It was fine.

Sure. But I was like, this is not wood. All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk about wood after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're back, Chuck, and we're going to talk. This would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about basically the physics of how a fireplace works. Yeah. Because there are some physics involved. Yeah. Pretty impressive ones, if you ask me.

Yeah, I love this article said, lighting a fire inside your living room, and it kind of hits home like how kind of crazy that is. Right. And said, there are two challenges, one, not setting your house on fire to keep the smoke from entering the room. Yeah.

But yeah, never really thought about it. And everything we just talked about basically was to prevent the first part, catching your house on fire, the surround, the hearth, all that stuff. Yeah. But then if you get a little more into the guts of the fireplace, that's to keep the smoke from filling up in the room.

And when you look around your house, you'll find that there's a lot of different places for air to get in. And that's actually quite necessary for a fireplace. It's quite necessary for living and breathing. Sure, for breathing. It's important for that, too. But to keep a fire going and to keep the smoke from going,

filling up your living room. Which again, you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your damper open, which I had before. Sure. If you have air coming into your house, then you can keep the air, the smoke from the fire, going up the way it's supposed to. And that happens simply because heat tends to rise.

Yeah, one of the places I get a nice flow of air in my house is from closed windows. Oh yeah, you got thin windows? Yeah, we have it. We've only redone a few of the windows. That's on my must-do list is to get all the windows replaced. But it ain't cheap. But you're going to earn that money back over time

with efficiencies. But yeah, I have those old windows. It can be fully shut, and you can stand, and your hair will blow. And I'm like, where's this coming from? It's going through the glass. It feels like. It's defying the laws of physics.

It's freezing near my windows. Now, I remember, you and I had a house like that. And it was, I mean, the wavy, vaguely wavy kind of windows. Yeah, those were thin. It's kind of neat, though, to think that in 2016, I'm living like a settler, basically, in parts of my home. Tuning your own butter. So yeah, you want to talk about the different kinds of heat?

Yeah. So you've got conduction, convection, and radiation. And fireplaces use convection and radiation, but not conduction, hopefully not conduction. No, conduction means your house is catching fire. That means you're literally touching something hot. Correct, yeah. But convection, of course, is when

that hot air is circulating to cooler areas of your home in this case. And the radiation is just literally feeling that flame warmth. Yeah, in the case of the fireplace, it's infrared invisible light electromagnetic radiation, basically. There is actually some radio waves and some microwaves

produced by a fire, which is kind of cool. But for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation, and you're seeing visible light radiation, right? Yes. So when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being emitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection.

Yeah, big time. And yeah, big time's right. Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is moved through a fire. And because you want to keep the smoke out of your house, you're also actually keeping those convection currents from going into your house as well. Meaning, as Ben Franklin pointed out,

because remember, he was a huge complainer, that most of the heat from a fire is just purposefully being funneled out of the house up through the flue in the chimney. I think it drove him nuts a little bit, looking through some of these quotes. Yeah, because he really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a fireplace better.

He got to understand, though, too, when he was alive, these weren't just for charm. No, no. They were to stay alive. Yeah. And the idea that you were wasting all this fuel, I think probably part of it also was the inefficiency. Probably drove him nuts.

Well, yeah, I mean, he's dead right. You've got so much heat just going right up the chimney. And not only that, when you get that draft, because the fire needs the oxygen. Right. So that's another reason it's pulling this air in. But it's also pulling in, you've got your thermostat on, and your heat going.

Sure. It's pulling some of that warmer air in and up and out as well. Right. And even air that it's warming through convection, like that's being irradiated out of the fireplace, it's being sucked in. And as a result, again, when that air is sucked into the fire

and is pushed up the flue through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. It's creating what's called a negative pressurization. Right? Yes. And that means that air wants to come in and replace the air that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So cold air from outside is being drawn in,

which is how, like you said before. My windows. Right? Sure. But the fire can actually make your house even colder, because it's pushing the warm air out through the fireplace and sucking in cold air from the outside. Yeah, and it says here, here's a stat that said

that a traditional fireplace can draw four to 10 times as much air from the room that it needs to actually burn that fire. Yeah, something like 500 cubic liters of air a minute. Yeah, so compare that to the smart fireplace, AKA the wood burning stove. AKA the TV with the fire burning on it, right? I love a wood burning stove, man. Those are great.

D, I've never really been into those. Yeah, I mean. I got no problems with them. It's not a, it doesn't, it's not good for every home. Aren't they incredibly dangerous? Like they get super hot, right? They're really hot. So like, if you fell onto one or something,

you'd be in big trouble, right? Yeah, you don't put the skateboard next to it. OK. Like a banana peel. OK. Step one. But, and you know, you're not going to have like a super modern house with a wood burning stove.

Like it's a little more charming in your cabin or something. Actually, I was looking through, I think, a popular mechanics or something. I had different types of stoves. Oh, yeah? Stoves. And there are some that are kind of mod. Oh, well, that's cool.

Yeah. So they're trying to bring it into the future? Yes. Well, they're remarkably efficient. How much did you say, 500? 500 cubic liters, I believe, of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace, an average fireplace. And only 20 for a wood burning stove.

Yeah, that's pretty efficient. So they're super hot. You can cook on them, too. You can boil your water and do all sorts of things. Sure. You know? Just don't touch it. No.

I think the Randazos had one in their place in Connecticut. Oh, yeah? Yeah, and I think it supposedly works super well. Sure. Like it'll heat a room and then some. Yeah. You know? Well, and the reason why is because it's

like a contained fireplace, but it's not just, you know. Wide open. It's out in the open. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, you shut the door to it. Right, you shut the door to it, so you're saving the warmer around it from being sucked in, right? Correct. And then it's also removed from the interior of the wall

so that it can heat on all sides. Yeah, it's right out there so you can follow it. Sure. And then the flue itself can go up and then out of the room so that the hot gas that's being carried out can heat the air in the room around it. So you've got. That stove pipe.

Yeah, you've got a lot of different ways the air is being warmed in your house by a wood stove. Yeah, I'm going to look into these new ones. There's new ones. There's also like very, there's some famous ones. They're like mid-century design that are super mod. Swedish ones. And then there's like, there's ones

that look kind of like the traditional ones, but they're newly built and like they're improved designs. Remember the old 70s fireplaces that were like orange metal that would sit out in the room? That's the Swedish one I'm talking about. Oh, really? Yeah. It's based on that old 70s look.

No, that's the one I'm talking about is the 70s. Oh, OK. Yeah, there's newer ones too. Gotcha. But the iconic orange one, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like my friend, one friend in high school, Chris Bhutan, had the most 70s house.

Is that right? Dude, it was wonderful. Yeah. Like it was the orange fireplace built in a terrarium set. Wow. With plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall. Was there macrame?

Oh, I'm sure there was macrame at some point. But it was just, it had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I like those, yeah. And looking back now, like it's a super cool, like mod house. Like people now would be like, oh my god, it's preserved in time. It's the greatest thing ever. Right.

Like his waterbed, of course. But one of his walls, his entire wall, was like a blown up photograph of like a Hawaiian sunset. Oh, we had a couple of those in our house. Not a Hawaiian sunset, but we had like a forest with a waterfall going through it, and then in our kitchen, a forest mural. Yeah. No water.

That's very ice storm. Yeah, I've not seen that movie, but I can imagine. Because that was 70s, right? Is that in the 70s? Yeah, I mean like key parties are happening, and people are drinking eggnog around the orange lacquered fireplace. Nice.

It's a wonderful time. But let's say you have just the regular, regular old fireplace to start. Yeah. Right? Traditionally. You want to, you come across it, you say, what the heck is this thing?

What do I do? Well, the first thing you do is you log on to the internet and go to House of Works and look up how to operate a fireplace. Because House of Works has you covered, man. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I could say this would probably be good for is if you've never, literally never started a fire. But it seems like common knowledge to me. Yeah, there's some details in there that I don't know.

Like hardwoods, right? You don't want to burn pine or any softwood. OK. You want your hardwoods like hickory, ash, oak, and that kind of stuff. And you want it seasoned. That's the key. Yeah, you can't go cut down a tree in your yard

and chop it up and burn it the next week. That's not going to work. Because it will smoke, and you'll see literally, I mean, when I go camping, we get rooked all the time on firewood purchases. Oh, yeah. And we sit down for the evening, throw the wood on there, and you just start hearing the sizzle.

And you see the water just literally boiling out of it. Right. And we're just like, oh, man. Well, OK. That roadside guy, I'm going to go back. Here's how you tell. You've got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch him squirm.

Take two logs. Yeah. And you knock them together. And what you're looking for is a hollow sound. No thud, hollow sound. Then you know it's seasoned. Yeah, but he would go like, city boy, this is North Georgia lob lolly pine.

You don't know what you're talking about. You'd say, well, pine's a softwood. I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods? I went to college. Shoot off my property and leave the boiled peanuts. You'd say, I'm going to take half of the boiled peanuts for my time.

Yeah, I feel like we always get wet wood. But at least six months, you want that wood drying out. They say a full year. What you're looking for is 20% moisture level by the time you're burning it. You could also put in a moisture level temperature or moisture indicator in the end. Yeah, there you go.

Did you buy the big city? But you look at the ends of the wood, too. And you'll see that it's cracked and split. It's usually dark like gray. It just looks aged. But the dead giveaways, the hollow thud sound. Yeah, I didn't know that, so I'm going to try that. The hollow thud, or I'm sorry, the hollow sound, not the thud.

Right. Yeah, that's what you're looking for. So you take your fire, or you take your wood, you put it on your fire grate. Although, so this is a component of the fireplace. It's not an actual part of it. Right. The fire grate is like this iron stand.

It's a grate. There's really no other way to describe it. Although, some fire aficionados suggest that you should use what are called and irons. Yeah, I like grates. Which are, well, an and iron is basically a grate missing the grate part in the middle. It's basically these two stands, a pair of stands

that go in the fireplace, and it holds the logs aloft. Yes, till they burn through. The grate does the same thing, except it keeps burning embers on the grate a little more. The reason why people are like and irons are grates because however you have it, a grate or an and iron, you want to keep a bed of embers going. Because that is going to eventually become hot enough

that you could throw anything on there, and it'll start to catch fire. So when you take your split logs, you put them on your grate or your and irons, put a little kindling beneath them, which is like thinner wood that'll catch fire easily. Light it on fire. Oh, I forgot.

First, you want to pour about a half a liter of kerosene on this to make sure that it starts. You do not. Oh, did I misspeak? That is just a joke, kids. You don't ever want to use any sort of lighter fluid or gas or anything like that to start an indoor fire. Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place.

So stop right now. Yes. This is for grown-ups. That's right. But you do want to use something like, I don't know, newspaper, just a piece of paper to light the kindling. But no, you don't want to use any sort of accelerant. Well, people don't get newspapers anymore,

so you can just light your Kindle or your iPad, throw that in there instead. It'll start. But that kindling's going to catch. And if your wood is seasoned, it'll catch too. And then all of a sudden, you've got a fire. Yeah, you may want to adjust that damper a little bit to keep your airflow how you want it.

Right. And again, when you have a fire going, one of the two main things you're trying to do, in addition to not burn down your house, is to keep the smoke from coming back in the room. And sometimes that's easier said than done, because every house has something called a neutral pressure plane, OK?

So above the neutral pressure plane, the air is pressurized. So it wants to push air out. And below it, air is the pressure inside the house, is lower, so air wants to be sucked in. So as long as your fireplace, your chimney, is above that neutral pressure plane, you're going to be OK.

The air is going to want to go in. If it so happens that the air around your fireplace is a higher pressure, then the air is actually going to be pushed down the chimney into the firebox and out into the room, which is no good. But you can solve it pretty easily by just opening a window and allowing air to come in or go out depending.

Or have eight, 90-year-old windows. Right. Well, you don't have to worry about it at all. Because the air just flows through freely. So if you want to, we're talking about how inefficient they are. If you want to improve that efficiency, there are a couple of cool things you can do. One is called a tubular grate.

And that is exactly what you think. It is, instead of just a grate made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. It looks sort of like the motorcycle exhaust pipes and things. So it's just their tubular, so it's going to draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes. And then it's going to rise and then loop back around

and shoot out the top of the tubes into your room. Yeah. Well, it should work in theory. But remember, if your fireplace is working properly, it's sucking air from the room into the fire to fuel it and then shooting it out the chimney. So this air that's being warmed could be sucked right back into the fire.

That's right. But if you have it so that the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the grate can go out into the room, bam, you're set. Oh, is that a thing? Yeah. Oh, I haven't seen that. There's another thing called a, well,

this is what when Emily's parents have moved to Georgia now, but when they lived in Ohio, they had one of these recirculators that was a fan. Basically, you would turn on a switch and it would literally blow heat from underneath the grate back out into the room. And it worked really well, but it always seemed to blow a little stink out with it.

Stink? You know, fire stink. Oh, OK. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't see smoke pouring out of it or anything. But it didn't. It was still affecting your respiratory? Well, I mean, it didn't affect me so much,

but it was happening. Every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has kind of had the same deal to me, whether it's gas only or whatever. It always just seems to have this, but I'm very sensitive to odors anyway. So maybe that's something to do with that. I don't know.

Maybe. I'm a super smeller. Are you? A super smeller? What do you smell right now? I smell a knoll, like three rooms over. Wow. You are a super smeller.

Because we are hermetically sealed in here. Not true. And then those glass doors you talked about is another way to increase efficiency, but you're also going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much as 50%. Yeah, there's not a lot that you can do to have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of the fire.

For the most part, it's going to lose more heat than it puts out. You just want to hope that you can warm the room you're in with the fire enough so that you don't mind. Yeah. Or if you're just after the aesthetic, then good for you. You mean I lived in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years? Yeah.

We were hooked on it. Yeah. Hooked on it. Wood burning, I guess. Yeah, oh yeah. And we could get that room like hot, you know? Toasty. If you keep fire going long enough, that's the key.

You just have to waste more wood than you can imagine. All right, well, we'll take another little quickie break here and we'll come back and talk about some more options and a very depressing history of child labor. On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Josh, we've been talking about wood a lot, because that's clearly the superior fireplace, seriously.

But you can get the old gas fake log fireplace these days. My mom made the switch. Fake logs look pretty good these days. So wait a minute, she had a wood burning fireplace and had a gas insert put in? Yes. Wow, OK. So because she had a, like I had growing up to the gas

starter, so you would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off. Gotcha. So she just retrofitted it. Actually, I did it, my brother, into full gas with the fake logs. That they look good these days. You can arrange them in yourself in a way

that looks aesthetically pleasing. Right, they don't come in that mound that shaped to look like three logs laying on top of each other. No, it's come a long way, I'll say that. Don't they have beds of embers now, too, and all that? They kind of catch the little flickery glow. Yep. What is it?

They've come a long way with trying to simulate that look. Pika, pika, pika. I don't know what that is. It's like the Japanese word for that, like the little tinkling glow. Oh, I don't know. I'm saying it wrong, but it's a throwback. I said it wrong on some other episode years back.

Oh, you're talking about pretty, pretty? No. Pura, pura. Pura, pura, pura? Yeah, but that's something different. Yeah, I'll have to go back and find it. Maybe we'll just edit this whole part out. So the gas logs covering the gas vent,

you're going to burn that fire behind glass. It's going to give off radiant and convicted heat. You're probably going to have a air, not recycler, what would I call it? Exchanger? Air exchanger there working as well. Yeah, and one of the reasons it's so much more efficient is because it doesn't require any air from inside your room.

Yeah. It draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less, right? Yeah. So it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to burn. It's just going to say, you keep it. I'm gas.

I'm super efficient. I love you in ways that wood could never imagine. Yeah, that's true. Wood is dirty and bumbling. And why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas. So if you're getting a new house, you're probably going to have a gas fireplace.

If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably going to be a gas fireplace. Sure. That's the direction they're steering you these days. Yeah, oh yeah. I would guess you. Because gas. I would guess you're going to pay significantly more

for a wood burning fireplace to be built into your new house than a gas one. You think? Yeah, probably just because so I'll bet there's relatively few, especially down below the Mason-Dixon line, relatively few builders who know how to put in a wood burning fireplace. Yeah, you've got to find a builder from 1973.

Basically, yeah. And he's going to want to give you one of those orange modern jobs that you're like, yes, this is cool, but no, I want like the real thing. Yeah. He's like, this is real. So they're very efficient to these gas fireplaces. Sure.

The gas burns cleanly. They even have them that are vent-free. But people also say, you know what, if your house is not like Chuck's and it is actually pretty tight, as we call it, and sealed up, then they can actually deplete oxygen or moisture can build up. So the jury's still out somewhat on these gas fireplaces.

I say the jury is in. Oh yeah? And I'm the jury. And I say, a vent-free fireplace is a stupid idea. It's pumping carbon dioxide into your house. Yeah. That's never good. You would think.

Yeah. You can get an ethanol fireplace. This one seems like, OK, you've seen them before, right? Like if you go to a Marriott courtyard or something like that. Yeah. They'll have like the chair situated around a table with a fireplace in the middle of the table. It's not.

Yeah. It's just burning ethanol. The flame is actually cold. It's basically like, yeah, right. It's basically like a sterno fireplace. Yeah. You know? You want to light your fondue pod or something

like that from beneath? Yeah. It's the same thing, I think. Yeah. Virtually. And then you can get the woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace. Well, there's some now where you can get like an entertainment

center with like a TV and then beneath it a fake electric fireplace. Yeah. It's cool. So an electric fireplace has no fire. It is a heater and it, you know, it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old. In squinting.

If you're squinty four-year-old. Right. But, you know, we don't want to yuck someone's yum. So if that's your bag, then more power to you. It's just not for me. I have to take issue, though, with this article. It says that it's emission-free. It's emission-free on the user end.

Right. Still electricity, which means it's producing emissions at the coal fire power plant that's producing that electricity. Yeah, that is pretty much. So don't be fooled if you're like, oh, it's emission-free. No. No. We're going to yuck that yum.

Safety-wise, got to watch out for those sparks if you got carpet around or hardwoods, I reckon. Yeah. Keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace. Yeah. The big one. Don't put, you might want a fire extinguisher, but don't put it in the fireplace itself.

Carbon monoxide investing in a carbon monoxide detector is worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like a smart carbon monoxide detector, although get one of those if you want. I'm just saying, if you're using a wood-burning fireplace, at the very least, get yourself a cheap but decent carbon monoxide detector. Yeah, get a dumb one.

Smoke detector's not quite enough. Yeah, I think you have to have those now. Isn't that the new code? I don't know. I haven't read the zoning codes in a while, building codes. You should take a look. This is one of those once-a-year things. If you know what you're doing, you can at least get a flashlight

and look everything over and see if there's anything obvious. If your flu cap is no longer on your chimney. Hurricane hit. Yeah, if there are big cracks or anything. So what's wrong with your cracks? Like your house would catch on fire? All I know is the guy did a lot of like, what he is. Maybe he just wasn't feeling it that day.

No, he didn't put on a good show. He came over because their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces. So I thought this guy's going to be like, oh great, this is what I do. He acted like he didn't want to do the job. Right, but that's not the same. That's a lot of work, man.

You were going to have to fix your chimney on the inside, and it's cracked here, and you got this, and you got that. I was like, yeah, that's what you advertise, is you fix old situations. Right. You should bring somebody else out. Yeah, I didn't like that guy. Yeah.

You're going to bring out someone with some little moxie. But you do, even if you think that your fireplace is doing great, it pays to pay somebody to come out and look at it inside. Like, is it too much to ask for a little energy from your fireplace guy? A little wow factor, maybe? Yes, you're correct. You do need a pro every now and then to come out.

They're called chimney sweeps. Yeah. Creosote is something, if you look up Creosote, C-R-E-O-S-O-T-E online, it sort of looks like black lava built up on the inside of your chimney. Right, and it itself could catch fire. Yeah. And you have a chimney fire, in which case,

and it sounds a little counterintuitive, like, well, there's fire going through it all the time. Fire going through it is much different from fire, like your chimney being on fire itself. Yeah, that's not good. And if your chimney is on fire, your house can catch fire fairly easy, especially if you have cracks in there, because it goes, whoosh.

And all of a sudden, some pressure treated 2 by 4 is like, oh. You don't want to burn that pressure treated 2 by 4, by the way, as wood. Yeah. I don't think we mentioned that. No. One thing you can burn, though, which I wouldn't use,

but it's called a chimney sweep log, or a creosote log. And it's just a special log. It's sort of like a duraflame. It's a prefab log. Right, it's a chemical log. But it's supposed to break down that creosote. Yeah. I just, I don't know.

Something about that made me, my radar went off, like, I don't know if that's the best way to do things. Yeah. Don't have any proof. But I hear a chemical log that knocks that creosote loose, and it just didn't sound like the smart approach. Well, even the Chimney Safety Institute of America says, no, no.

Like, yeah, those things kind of work, but you want, like, actual scrubbing of the interior of your chimney. Yes. Which is what chimney sweeps did. Yeah. And then, if you want moxie in your chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say,

I want to buy your four-year-old boy and make him my chimney sweep slave. Yeah. I mean, earlier we teased and promised a child labor horror show. And that's pretty much what things were like in Jolly Old England after 1666, 2nd September.

To the 5th. I'm sorry, 5th September, technically. Yeah. The Great Fire of London changed a lot of things. And one of them was, chimneys were a little bit narrow, and they had a lot more rules as far as how clean you had to keep them. And so, like you said, what you would do

is you can't put an adult up there. No, not really. But you can't put a five-year-old boy. Or four, I think, is the youngest I saw them doing. Yeah. So you would literally buy a child from a poor person. Right. Stick this boy up in there.

They were your quote unquote apprentice, which basically was child slave. Unpaid child labor. Zero dollars. Right. And actually, chimney sweeping at the time. So after the Great Fire of London in 1666, I believe it was mandated by the Queen or Parliament

or somebody that everybody needed their chimneys kept up with. So chimney sweeps became a thing. But they actually swept chimneys free. It was a free service. The way that chimney sweeps made their money was from the soot that they gathered. They would sell it as fertilizer. Oh, I thought you were going to say sponsorships.

Like they would show up like their Chevy Tahoe jacket or something. Is like, nothing gets your chimney cleaned, like son of a gun by STP. So they would stick these kids in there. Sometimes they would literally light a fire under their butt to make them work faster. The kids would shimmy and distort their body

to shimmy in this little 18-inch wide chimney. And chip loose this creosote and soot that would then, because they're working above their head, would fall all over them. They would take a bath once a week, maybe once every month, maybe once every two or three months, depending on who you're asking. So these children are literally not,

I mean, if they survived this experience at all, they're not going to live past middle age. Right. So what you just described was a good day. Yeah. There were all sorts of other horrible maladies that could come about, deformation of their skeletons, because these kids are like 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 years old.

They're trying to grow. They're still developing, but they're spending hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So their bones, especially the bones in their ankles and knees, tended to grow in a deformed way. Unbelievable. There's something the first industrial-length cancer ever identified is called chimney sweeps cancer.

Other people call it scrotal carcinoma, where the scrotum was irritated by soot. And it would produce warts. And these warts, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually, if it wasn't cut out, the tumor would grow into the testes and then into the abdomen. And it was a very, very painful way to die.

Kids like 12 years of age were dying of scrotal cancer from this. Yeah, you get up pre-dawn. You work till the nighttime hours, 364 days a year. The one day that these kids would get off was May Day, International Labor Day. They would sleep. Then we said they collected that ash and soot and sold it.

They would store all the stuff in sacks, and the kids would then sleep in those rooms, still ingesting all the stuff in the air. And quite often, they would literally get stuck and die in these chimneys. Here's the part where I start to hyperventilate, just thinking about this. Oh, from claustrophobia?

Yeah. There's this thing called positional asphyxia. There's actually a pretty interesting vice article called a brief history of people getting stuck in chimneys. And they actually illustrate how positional asphyxia happens using the Grinch as he's going down the chimney and his feet start to get above his head. And all of a sudden, he's stuck.

You can't get out of that position. Oh, man. This would happen to real, live English boys, and American, too, apparently, who would get stuck in the chimneys that they were cleaning out and would die there because they would asphyxiate. Their abdomen couldn't take in breaths any longer. It happened a lot.

And actually, finally, it happened enough times that parliament started to get involved. They first got involved in 1788 with the Chimney Sweeps Act. And they said, you know what? This is crazy. You guys are buying four-year-old kids. You can't do that. Chimney Sweeps can be no younger than eight.

That was their first stab at reform, right? Yeah, and obviously, child labor was a lot different back then as far as how we thought about when kids should work. Or the idea of childhood hadn't even come about yet. Yeah, but even so, even for a time where it was believed that children should put forth an effort and work, like four and five-year-old kids, it's just ridiculous.

Sure, right? They also added, though, that if you are a master of the Chimney Sweep, you have to make sure that they are allowed to go to church on Sundays. That was the other part of the 1788 Act, right? Yeah. Then in the 1840 Act, they upped the age to 21,

which was significant. But apparently, it wasn't really enforced until 1875 when this one kid died. And he was basically the straw that broke the camel's back for the public. Yeah, his name was George Brewster, and he worked for a gentleman by the name of William Weier. And I say, gentlemen, what I mean is a scumbag.

And he was cleaning a hospital chimney, a full-born hospital, and he got stuck. And the great efforts were made to rescue him. They actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died, and Weier was actually found guilty of manslaughter. And his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody. And it became part of the campaign. And that was pretty much the end of using kids.

You know, he was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England. In England. I guess in the US, they kept using him for a while. So shameful. Really? Now, if you see a chimney sweep tell a four-year-old to go up in the chimney, you called police.

Because that is illegal these days, no matter where you live. Yeah. OK. Let's all agree to that. Agreed. You got anything else? No. Fireplaces, just in time for the fall.

Well, yeah, it's November here in Atlanta and in the mid-'80s, so we're ready to get that fireplace going. That's right. If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light a fire, you can go find that out by typing fireplace in the search bar at House of Forks. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this grammar police. Hey, guys, regular listener for quite some time. I finally become angered or inspired enough to write in about something. I used the sandwich technique proposed by Chuck recently, by the way. And I was listening to an older episode, Does a Body Replace Itself?

And you guys were talking about emails from the grammar police. Grammar only has strict rules to those who decided that it needed strict rules. As a society, we have a rather dramatic ebb and flow of grammar rules. There's no one entity to decide upon the rules. And therefore, there's no real right or wrong. You can almost consider it like a fashion, in a way.

We can all generally agree that double negatives are wrong, much like we can all agree that socks and sandals are wrong. And yet, some will still use them or wear them without a problem. As long as we can understand each other in the quote incorrect in quote, grammar does not take away from the meaning of your words, then it should not matter. There are different times in which proper grammar

is necessary and scrutinized. And then there are times when it frankly does not matter. There is a huge debate in the grammar world, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivists or descriptivists when it comes to the rules of grammar. It's a constantly evolving topic. And arguably, grammar is a constantly evolving entity.

I just thought I'd share my thoughts and hopes that you wouldn't get down on yourselves from the grammar police. And yes, feel free to pick apart my email for grammar errors. Nice. Happy face. That is from Kaleen Zakir, an English teacher and grammar enthusiast.

Thanks a lot, Kaleen. We appreciate that big time. We always love to hear support from people who are like, don't listen to the haters. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to get into this like Kaleen did, is it Kaleen?

Sure. Who cares? Yeah, I don't know. Because either way, whatever. Yeah, she said you can call me whatever. Sure. If you want to get in touch with us like Kaleen did, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathouse.first.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.