Free standing gas fireplaces, gas fireplace inserts and in this segment from my TV show, a cross breed between the two put a very inefficient fireplace back into operation. Yes you need a chimney liner when you do something like this - that is the duct sticking out of the fireplace in the photo....
Chimneys : The Six CommandmentsChimney does not belong to the house, but to its appliance.More carefully sized to the heating appliance.Be insulated.Be tightly constructed.Be located within the heating envelope of the house.Terminate at or near the highest point of the building.The best resource...
When the contractor installed a new furnace, he put in a great big air duct from outdoors right into the furnace room. This tends to freeze the basement floor. Can I close it off?Response:This duct is necessary in most modern homes and even in well sealed renovations to assure adequate air f...
Glenn has a 26 year old prefabricated chimney and the top section is rusted out. He can't find anyone who has a replacement section for the chimney. So he asked if I could find it, and if not, whether he could screw something else to the top of his chimney.It turns out that his particular ch...
A prefabricated chimney always has insulation in the chimney itself. Yet, when it is on the outside of the house, and when there is no fire burning, it gets as cold as outdoors. That?s when all that cold air wants to drop into the basement, giving you that downdraft every time you try to st...
Annie has three roofs on her house, a shingled roof in the front part followed by an asphalt and gravel flat roof and then an elastomeric membrane flat roof over her back porch. They all seem to leak. The asphalt roof is only six years old, installed by someone who advertised in the local paper...
Although most people, even contractors, may have a hard time defining the new building code term 'spillage susceptible', it is a term that is critically important for the everyone's health.An appliance, be it gas, oil, propane or wood, is spillage susceptible if it is possible for negative pre...
Many years ago, because of the prairie enforcement of the gas code provision that you had to supply fresh air to a furnace, an inventor in Alberta began marketing the Hoyme damper. This is a motorized damper that closes off that combustion air duct from the outdoors that dumps cold air into ...
Here we saw a oil furnace chimney that had completely plugged up with debris from trees, pieces of terracotta chimney liner and soot.Use of a Chim Scan video camera down the chimney permitted to determine that there were many open joints inside this chimney. The only real alternatives were to co...
Hello Jon,
I have a cathedral ceiling with a shingled roof. If I insulate the roof air tight, will the shingles lift and curl as they do on poorly ventilated roofs?
The other thought is leaving an 1 1/2 inch space between the roof deck and the insulation and installing a ridge vent, which give...
