notes

New Lives for Old Chimneys... ...or ideas for heat recovery in older houses In olden days... Right through the first half of the twentieth century the typical house had a fireplace in each of its principal rooms. A pair of semis or terrace houses might share a chimney stack with eight chimney pots, one for the front room, dining room and front and back bedrooms in each house. These fireplaces were open to the rooms and even without a fire thermal convection caused volumes of warm air from indoors to escape up the chimney to the outside, replaced by cold air from outside drawn in through air bricks or as draughts under doors and around leaky windows. With a fire lit to really drive convection, this loss of heat was multiplied. When I was a boy... Since the sixties central heating grew to be almost universal and houses were built with fewer  chimneys and most new homes now have none. Older houses were retrofitted with boilers and radiators and fireplaces were blocked up. Buildin...