Mods, if you think this belongs in IMHO, please move. I’m looking for fact-based opinions.
I’m gittin’ old and tired of buying and hauling firewood, so we are looking at installing vented gas logs in our fully functional wood burning fireplace.
The house was built in 1937, and as was typical of the era, the fireplace has a natural gas “log lighter,” basically a small gas pipe with outlets that can be lit with a match to light the wood. It turns on and off with a key that fits over a recessed stem in the hearth.
We have no idea if the sucker works. We’ve never tried it. We bought a key so we can now turn it on, but I’m a bit afraid of lighting a match and turning on the gas to see what happens.
Before trying to light it, would it by wise to spray the whole thing with Windex, like you do when you’re checking a gas pipe for leaks, just to see if the pipe is intact and gas is not coming out from around the fitting or something?
A house-leveling explosion might be frowned upon by any survivng neighbors.
natural gas has a stink added to it as a safety feature to let you know if it is leaking or unlit.
checking for the leak with soapy water wouldn’t hurt, though if your nose works you would sense a leak.
make sure the holes in the pipe are clean and open.
have a flame or spark at the holes before turning on. when turning on you should hear the sound of gas flow (hiss) and the flame should ignite rapidly. if it doesn’t within a couple seconds then turn it off. everyone should know how to turn this off and what the off position is.
By ‘vented gas logs’, do you mean the fake fireplace logs that burn natural gas? You wouldn’t be installing that yourself anyway, would you?
Just call whatever local place that installs fireplace inserts, pellet stoves, etc., and have them come out and take a look at things. They might not even charge you for an initial estimate. They shouldn’t, a quote should be free, if not call the next place.
If they charge you for the house call, even without selling you anything, it will probably be less than $150, and that is probably high.
Call someone, tell them what you have, and see what they say.
If you decide to just turn the key by yourself, you should be able to smell natural gas leaking before you try to light it. I would have someone else ready at the main gas shut off just in case that once you turn it on, you can shut it off. If the key hasn’t been turned in a while things might break, it might turn on but not off.
Just have the people who do these things for a living come out and look at your setup. They may offer a quote that is way more than you want to spend, but you don’t have to accept it and have the work done.
I personally do not deal with invisible things that can kill me, if I am not sure what I am doing.
I’ve used these things before. There’s not really much to them, or all that much that can go wrong. It’s just a valve, and a pipe with some holes at the end. The chimney is where the exhaust goes, so there isn’t the risk of carbon monoxide exposure.
The only tricky business is you are supposed to use an aim-a-flame or really long matches to light it.
Look, anything that could have cracked the pipe would have also cracked the part of the pipe that holds pressurized gas all the time, the part that is before the shutoff valve.
I wouldn’t be frightened of an explosion - you can smell the gas, and it takes a lot of it, and it has to be exactly the right fuel:air ratio to be explosive. Maybe open a window before you mess with this thing, and chill out about it.
Uh, re-read your post. 1937, huh. Maybe you should pay someone else to come take a look at it.
Also, keep in mind that these kind of fireplaces do jack for heating your house. The heat is all lost through the chimney.
Yes, heat loss through the chimney, as was the case with burning wood. It’s more for ambiance. Having said that, I’ve known a couple of people with the vent-free kind, and you can’t stand to be in the room after about five minute, because they put out so much heat.
Update! We managed to locate the stem (which wasn’t in the hearth, as I remembered it, but had been carpeted over). I took an Xacto knife and cleaned out all the openings in the log lighter, then we tried firing that puppy up. Worked great!
So great, in fact, that we thought, “Why not just install the log kit over the existing pipe without replumbing the whole thing?” And that’s just what we did. Made it a WAY easier job. Looking forward to a toasty fire tonight.
Make sure you can turn off the gas somewhere else, a convenient place as opposed to shutting off the gas in the whole house. Then try to turn the key, it might be frozen after years of disuse. If you can open that valve do a quick smell test, then turn it off. Check for smell again after a while, check with soapy water around the valve and outlet, and if there seem to be no problems try a quick flame test. If you have any problems at all turn off that the gas at that other location and call an expert or don’t use it. It isn’t easy to cause a gas explosion in a well ventilated area, but don’t take chances either.
ETA: Also check with your local gas utility, maybe they can help.
