Fireplace and Chimney Care for Genola Homes

Fruit wood is excellent fuel and a common cause of trouble

Apple, cherry and peach prunings burn hot and clean once they are properly dry, which is why so many households around here never buy a cord. The catch is that a tree taken out in February is soaking wet, and wood that comes off a lot in spring is not ready by October. Burning it wet costs you twice. Most of the fire's energy goes into boiling water out of the log instead of heating the room, and the cooler smoke that results condenses in the flue as tar rather than leaving as gas. Split it small, stack it off the ground with the sides open and only the top covered, and give it two summers. If you are lighting this winter with wood cut last winter, tell us, because the sweep interval should be shorter.

A low house gives its chimney very little to work with

Draft comes from the height of the warm column inside the flue, and a single-story home on flat ground offers the shortest column a chimney will ever have. There is no reserve. On a mild day, when the temperature difference between inside and outside is small, a marginal flue simply stops pulling and the smoke comes back at you. Sometimes the answer is height at the top. Sometimes it is a correctly sized liner, because an oversized flue on a small firebox never gets warm enough to move. We would rather measure and tell you which than sell you a fan.

The chimney on the gable end

Older houses in this area typically hang the stack on the gable end instead of running it up inside the heated envelope. That frees floor space and gives something up in return: three faces of the flue live at outdoor temperature for the life of the building. That chimney sits cold between fires, so every light-up starts by fighting a column of cold air, and the outside face takes the full freeze-thaw cycle year after year until joints open and brick faces flake away. Warming the flue before you light helps on the first count. For the second, the fix is repointing and a sound crown before water gets any further in.