We bought our house in 2018. It was built in 1973 and (as far as I can tell), it still had its original windows. It seems that they are in fact double-glazed, but have lost their insulating properties. In the cold weather they are visibly cold to the touch.
Since moving in, we have replaced a few windows each year, and have so far replaced 75% of them. The ones that remain are the largest ones in the house, picture windows in the south-facing sitting room. The sitting room is also where we have our fireplace, which is also 50 years old. This fireplace is mostly ornamental (the house has oil-fired radiators and floor heating on the ground floor), and is open with no enclosure/insert. When we build a fire it is pretty and heats the immediate surroundings, but it is clear that much of the heat is going up the chimney. And I have noticed that when we make a fire, I can almost feel a ‘draft’ coming from the remaining old windows. I am not sure there is an actual draft (I don’t see any broken seals around the windows), but at the least there is a convention current happening.
So I was thinking of replacing these final windows in the spring in hopes that for next winter we would actually be able to use the fireplace as a source of heat. But is this the correct strategy? I have heard that if I want to have an efficient fireplace, then I really need to add an insert to ensure that the heat generated stays in the house.
If I had to choose between replacing the last windows and putting in a fireplace insert, what would you recommend? The approximate costs are about the same according to the quotes I have received.
Hmm. I’ve always had a free standing woodstove. Well, It’s now propane. It has a coaxial vent. Meaning exhaust goes out and air to combust comes in in the same flue. Works great. So no heat loss there.
My Wife and I love the feel of the stove, and whenever we move we are going to have something similar.
This is going to sound like a Norman Rockwell painting, but one of our dogs always lays in front of it, with my Wife and I playing chess 10 feet away. Norman never included the beers in his painting though
I would lean towards the stove, and then windows/window cover insulation next.
I don’t see your situation as new windows vs. fireplace insert. It’s really two separate questions.
The draft from the old windows is most likely coming in around the edges between the walls and frame. Caulking will shut that off.
A traditional fireplace sucks more warm air than it replaces. An insert, especially one with heat exchange ducts around the fire box, will do more to deliver heat to the house. As to the efficiency of a fireplace insert, consider how many days a year you actually use the fireplace. Only those days count in the overall equation.
New windows, with energy blocking film in the sandwich and better-sealing sashes than your 50 year old originals, will give you a gain in your overall energy equation.
Yeah, I think that is what the fireplace insert would do. It would have some sort of intake pipe running next to the exhaust pipe in the chimney.
There is currently some sort of air intake that comes through the external wall just below the level of the fireplace. But that doesn’t seem to stop it from creating a draw from within the house as well…
I agree. But I guess my question was whether the fixing the windows alone would let the fireplace heat the house better, and it seems that it will not.
I don’t think air is coming from the edges. They seem OK. I think it is just the cold radiating through the (no longer insulated) glass and causing convection currents.
Depending on the insert and your flue situation, you should not need two pipes. It’s coaxial. A pipe in a pipe.
That’s what I have any way, but it does not go up an existing fireplace flue. It goes up takes a 90 degree turn and goes out the wall.
Just what I was going to post. Thermals are common near windows because of the collision of warm/cold air.
We had very large windows in Alaska, but we had a gas insert fireplace with the double-walled flue as mentioned above. Very efficient. With the circulating fan on, it could become uncomfortably warm on that floor level, which was large and had vaulted ceilings.
I think that if the glass had “lost it’s insulation”, whatever that means about the glass unit in question, you might be seeing fogging between the panes and even condensation on the inside face of the unit. Haven’t looked into the technology for almost forty years, but as I remember, the only truly insulated glass was Thermopane, which was two sheets of glass with a welded edge (welded with glass!) all around. One pane was drilled, the space between vacuum-evacuated and left as a vacuum, which would insulate as a thermos bottle does. Very expensive!
Has rubber-gasketed and sealant tech advanced to where you can pull a vacuum in the kind of unit with a rubber spacer around the edges? Because the best such a unit can do (I think) is lower the risk of interior condensation.
One pane of glass = R1, two panes with an airspace = another R1, not enough to keep cold convection currents from rolling off the interior surface, because the air between the panes will happily transfer heat.
My advice, after heating a house and a cabinet shop with wood for a dozen years, is to decide how much dust (ash) you are willing to put up with. Maybe an insert used intermittently on cold and windy days would be a good idea - I know I would never want to heat exclusively with wood again, no matter how strenuously my dogs and cats might campaign for that option.
Agreeing with others: an open fireplace designed purely for looks isn’t going to heat the place, and is probably a net loss of heat when running. (Fireplaces in very old houses, which were meant to heat them, were designed differently, and can produce a net gain though still nowhere near as well as an enclosed stove. But very few modern ones are made like that.)
I have an enclosed wood stove, which provides a large chunk of the heat for the house, despite leaky windows. Get a good fireplace insert, or replace the fireplace with an enclosed wood stove. Get one you can at least heat a kettle on, and that doesn’t need electricity to run; then you’ll also have an emergency backup for both heat and hot food in case of outages, which no amount of improving the windows will accomplish.
A heavy curtain over the windows can also help a good deal. Some of those aren’t cheap either, of course; though still cheaper than replacing the windows.
Oh yeah. 11,200 feet in the Rockies, and we rarely use the fan. It’ll drive you right out of there.
And while I miss heating with wood. I DO NOT miss the mess and stacking 6 cords of wood a year. That’s your summer. That’s pretty much what you do. Get ready for winter.
But let me say, this isn’t for the occasional fire. This is our heat source.
Agree with those saying to go with some kind of insert. You can do gas, or you can do wood stove. I have multiple fireplaces, and I’ve converted one to a wood stove and one to gas (the remaining one I’ve left as a fireplace, but it only gets used on special occasions).
We love both. I enjoy stacking the wood, tending the fire, etc. My wife likes pressing “on” on the gas insert.
Either will make you happy, and both can save energy costs (we keep the heat low and warm the room we’re in)
The best part is not worrying whether or not the fire is completely out or if some random spark is left that will burn your house down. When a gas insert is off, it’s OFF.
They also have pellet stove inserts, also a new free standing pellet stove is far easier to install than a wood stove, so you could go for a stove instead of an insert and put it where you want while keeping the fireplace for when you want the real thing. Pellet stoves have some advantages over wood, including setting the heat level (some have thermostatic controls), less mess, and much less tending than a wood stove. Fuel tends to be more expensive than cord wood per btu, however ease of use and precise temperature settings of a pellet stove typically would have one use it more and at a more consistent temperature which may negate the higher fuel cost.
Another option to consider is a heat pump which depending on your electric rates can be as cheap to heat with as wood.
That’s an open-fireplace risk (and not much of one, if you know what you’re doing). Won’t happen with a properly designed closed stove unless you really screw up the way you use it. I go to bed with a damped down fire going all the time. (Well, not in the summer.)
Exactly, there is some condensation. And more interestingly, some of the old windows seemed to have some (fossil) bacterial/fungal colonies inside. When we first moved in we were stymied by some ‘smudges’ on the windows that we could not remove even after thoroughly cleaning them from inside the house and outside the house. Only when I looked very closely did I realise that they weren’t smudges at all but rather had a somewhat geometric pattern. They were between the two panes of glass.
If you use it as a heat source say six months out of the year, a wood stove is going to need to have the chimney/flue swept yearly. Don’t have to worry about that with propane/NG.
I have our propane stove on a thermostat. I used to come home in the winter and have to get the fire going pretty much every day that was the first thing I did. Pine just won’t burn for 10 hours.
Our wood pile was close, but we would stack about a weeks worth of wood inside the house on weekends. Another chore I don’t miss.
Yeah, I’ve got that too. My windows are floor to ceiling for passive solar. They let a LOT of heat in to the point that the house gets too warm in winter (sun is lower in the sky and shines right in, plus reflects off the snow. Wammo). We have a 10 of these. But then they let all the heat back out at night. It works for us.
Three or four cloudy days in a row is really noticeable.
It works for us.