Stoves, Furnaces and Chimneys : Part 4

American Woman's Home
by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(Page 9 of 44)

Another cause is the descent, into unused fireplaces, of smoke from other chimneys near. The remedy is to close the throat of the unused chimney.

Another cause is a door opening toward the fireplace, on the same side of the room, so that its draught passes along the wall and makes a current that draws out the smoke. The remedy is to change the hanging of the door so as to open another way.

Another cause is strong winds. The remedy is a turn-cap on top of the chimney.

Another cause is the roughness of the inside of a chimney, or projections which impede the passage of the smoke. Every chimney should be built of equal dimensions from bottom to top, with no projections into it, with as few bends as possible and with the surface of the inside as smooth as possible.

Another cause of poor droughts is openings into the chimney of chambers for stove-pipes. The remedy is to close them, or insert stove-pipes that are in use.

Another cause is the falling out of brick in some part of the chimney so that outer air is admitted. The remedy is to close the opening.

The draught of a stove may be affected by most of these causes. It also demands that the fireplace have a tight fire-board, or that the throat he carefully filled. For neglecting this, many a good stove has been thrown aside and a poor one taken in its place.

If all young women had committed to memory these causes of evil and their remedies, many a badly-built chimney might have been cured and many smoke-drawn tears, sighs, ill-tempers and irritating words avoided.

But there are dangers in this direction which demand special attention. Where one flue has two stoves or fireplaces, in rooms one above the other, in certain states of the atmosphere, the lower room, being the warmer, the colder air and carbonic acid in the room above will pass down into the lower room through the opening for the stove or the fireplace.

This occurred not long since in a boarding-school, when the gas in a room above flowed into a lower one and suffocated several to death. This room had no mode of ventilation and several persons slept in it and were therefore stifled. Professor Brewer states a similar case in the family of a relative. An anthracite stove was used in the upper room; and on one still, close night, the gas from this stove descended through the flue and the opening into a room below and stifled two persons to insensibility, though, by proper efforts, their lives were saved. Many such cases have occurred where rooms have been therefore filled with poisonous gases and servants and children destroyed, or their constitutions injured, simply because housekeepers are not properly instructed in this important branch of their profession.

Furnaces

There is no improved mechanism in the economy of domestic life requiring more intelligent management than furnaces. Let us then consider some of the principles involved.

The earth is heated by radiation from the sun. The air is not warmed by the passage of the sun's heat through it, but by convection from the earth, in the same way that it is warmed by the surfaces of stoves. The lower stratum of air is warmed by the earth and by objects which have been warmed by radiated heat from the sun. The particles of air therefore heated expand, become lighter and rise, being replaced by the descent of the cooler and heavier particles from above, which, on being warmed also rise and give place to others. Owing to this process, the air is warmest nearest the earth and grows cooler as height increases.

The air has a strong attraction for water and always holds a certain quantity as invisible vapor. The warmer the air, the more moisture it demands and it will draw it from all objects within reach. The air holds water according to its temperature. therefore, at fifty-two degrees, Fahrenheit's thermometer, it holds half the moisture it can sustain; but at thirty-six degrees, it will hold only one eighty-sixth part. The earth and all plants and trees are constantly sending out moisture; and when the air has received all it can hold, without depositing it as dew, it is said to be saturated and the point of temperature at which dew begins to form, by condensation, upon the surface of the earth and its vegetation, is called the dew-point. When air, at a given temperature, has only forty percent of the moisture it requires for saturation, it is said to be dry. In a hot summer day, the air will hold far more moisture than in cool days. In summer, out-door air rarely holds less than half its volume of water. In 1838, at Cambridge, Massachusetts and New-Haven, Connecticut, at seventy degrees, Fahrenheit, the air held eighty percent of moisture.

In New Orleans, the air often retains ninety percent of the moisture it is capable of holding; and in cool days at the North, in foggy weather, the air is sometimes wholly saturated.

When air holds all the moisture it can, without depositing dew, its moisture is called 100. When it holds three fourths of this, it is said to be at seventy-five percent. When it holds only one half, it is at fifty percent. When it holds only one fourth, it is at twenty-five percent, etc.

Sanitary observers teach that the proper amount of moisture in the air ranges from forty to seventy percent of saturation.

About the Author

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800 - 1878) was a noted educator, renowned for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of a kindergarten into children's education.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain.