The things you need to know before building a fireplace, fireplace talk, the how to.

okay um so today i want to talk fireplaces but i want to start at the beginning um i just built this fireplace last summer and the most important thing is from the very beginning getting all the aspects of building it proper so that you can use it and so let's start with the foundation of the chimney this is all made of stone there's a flue tile lining tons upon tons upon tons of stone so it must be on solid ground this one is on bedrock when i dug the footer for the cabin i hit solid rock it varied here and there so my footer for this is actually in the basement under the concrete floor runs from six inches deep on this side to 30 inches deep on this side because that's where the stone shelf was so it is sitting on solid bedrock it was poured with the concrete floor so it's all locked into the concrete floor um so first off now i know it can't go anywhere second the foundation in the basement i built with concrete blocks but because this was going to be so heavy i also filled those concrete blocks with solid concrete so that the weight of this didn't actually crush those man-made block um so then and the hearth extension and the hearth have no wood under it that's one of the biggest mistakes people make when they build a fireplace is they run the floor that they're building right up to the fireplace and what happens is when you build a fire for an extended period of time it catches the floor on fire just in front of the fireplace so there is no wood under this it is 12 inches of solid concrete um tapered down of course for the heart extension if this cabin was gone everything that you see here would still stand it is on that solid of bedrock i don't know if you've ever been just driving down the road and seeing a fireplace standing there and no house because it withstood that house falling down around it and it's still standing straight this would do the same um now let's move up to sizing the fireplace one of the you know if there's any one thing that i know the most when it comes to any of this cabin stuff it's the fireplace um i've been a chimney sweep my entire life um i know every aspect of a fireplace and chimney um so the size that is required for a fireplace to offer operate properly is the flu must be 10 of this opening so in my case i wrote down some numbers here and i'll put a small screenshot of this on there in my case i've got an opening that's 44 inches wide and 41 inches tall that's 1804 square feet so i need at least 180 square inches in my flue okay so what i used was a 17 by 17 flue tile which gives me 289 square inches i'm actually closer to 16 than i am 10. now the art of engineering something is the art of knowing what's the minimum you can get away with and 10 is your minimum if you have a square flue you can go a little bit lower if you have a round flue but because i'm at 16 i can change some of the other variables like i built this thing for cooking when you put a big pot over top of a fire now that fire has to wrap around that pot and you've changed some of those variables i might have the smoke that actually wants to be pushed into the room by the pot so now because i've got that 16 percent i can deal with a little bit of this so it'll suck that smoke back in or when i'm using the rotisserie and i'm going to make a video doing a lot of different cooking stuff over the years but i've got a rotisserie here i actually dragged the fire completely in front of the fireplace it's not even in the fireplace but i have enough draft that it still sucks all the smoke back into the fireplace and up the chimney i don't have to deal with smoke in the house um so that's that's really important next the damper that you open and close that damper has to be set at least eight to ten inches above the opening because when your chimney is cold that smoke is going up because heat rises but yet it's not going up real good so it'll sit there and it'll roll a little bit at that damper area until it's its turn to get sucked in until you get the flu warmed up and then once that flu is warmed up it just goes so so that's second smoke chamber is next so above this opening my damper is here this is a big upside down funnel here that funnels from this big opening into that 17 by 17. so so when you make that transition these walls should be nice and smooth you know a lot of the chimneys i clean um you know people didn't really know what they were doing or they didn't care and and they're staggered there's blocks there's holes in the blocks and that just makes for a dragon area for that smoke to have to try to get around and it just doesn't work real well will it work sure to work but not as nice as a nice smooth surface i mean when that is smooth up in there the smoke just wants to take off and go so you don't have to deal with smoke um the next big key is how tall the chimney is draft is caused from stack effect so you have hot air stacked on top of hot air and the more hot air that's stacked on top of that hot air the more push you get so the taller the chimney is by design the better it's going to draft now there comes a point when that smoke starts to cool off and it doesn't become effective anymore but like with this cabin i'm probably 25 26 feet to the peak it's a small cabin um so my chimney is is 30 feet tall let's just say um so i've got 30 feet of hot air stacked on top of hot air to get pushing this thing up the second is that termination it needs to be at least three feet above the peak now the rule of thumb is two feet taller than anything within 10 feet but if you're coming above the peak you're automatically there's nothing else around you so three feet out of the peak of the roof and that is the best place to have it i can't even tell you how many times i've went to a house and they've got this beautiful fireplace and they can't use it because they build it in the wrong area by code it's perfect it is two feet taller than anything within 10 feet but that extra chimney sticking above the roof line might cool down too much when they burn it the house stinks like kriya said chimneys belong where this one is on the end of a house if you can do it inside like this one is perfect because then it stays warm all winter and you always have an upward flow of air and you never get that downflow that stinks so inside's best if you have to go on the outside it definitely should be built at a gable end all the way to the peak and then passed of course um chimney caps yeah you probably should have a chimney cap on it i do not um i don't have a screen over the front either um these are things they just didn't have back then and as much as safety is an issue um i really like the look of this i don't go far from it when it's burning so this is the way it'll be i'm not putting a screen on it i'm not putting doors on it i don't normally use a grate i have different grate systems that i can use from time to time i don't i put it on the floor because this is kind of like they would have done back then that floor will definitely get much hotter with it sitting on the floor like that but again there's nothing under it it's solid concrete there's nothing down there to catch on fire i'm not concerned um so anyway i think i hit pretty much everything and like i mentioned you know this has the crane for cooking and i do my coffee in there and i got all different kinds of set racks that i use for cooking in there and there's already a couple videos on my channel um but i'll make a couple more over the years and and get as many of those posted as i can with different recipes so anyway i hope this helps someone to build their own fireplace their own stone there is another video on my page as far as like uh the kind of mortar i used and and those things one thing i forgot to mention is like i burn this thing pretty hot from time to time stone don't really heat doesn't go through stone very well because it has so much air space in it but it's sandstone are not the strongest stone in the world i mean if you put a sandstone in an open fire it will break down relatively quick the hottest place on this fireplace is right there behind the fire because when i get a really hot fire going the air that flows in here pushes air past the ember power kind of like forging steel and it pushes it right into that back wall so that's why that big iron plate is sitting there that is to absorb that bulk of that heat and help keep those stone from falling apart in the back if you've ever seen the inside of a fireplace that's the first place that falls apart so i try to protect that the best i can so that i can use this thing for a long time so anyway enjoy the video i hope it was informative to you if you have any questions please comment and i will answer anything i can thank you

Channel: the log cabin life style by Jerry Tyson

Views: 47,870

Keywords: Stone fireplace, Log cabin, Primitive living, Fireplace, Hearth cooking, How to

Id: P8ohmQqkJVw

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022