Heating Stoves Designed For Single Room Use
In the old days people would gather around the old wood burning stove to keep warm while they shot breeze before heading back to their homes. These heating stoves were usually placed in the center of a room, worked on the principal of radiating heat from the center. As the outside metal jacket of the heating stoves heated from the inside fire, it would radiate outwards as well as up to provide a localized heat source.
With some applications, heating stoves could be used to heat a much larger area using duct work and gravity to disperse the heat over a wider area. A metal cone was hung over the stove with larger pipes attached to it that were spread throughout an area. As heat from the heating stoves rose up, it would be funneled into the cone with gravity forcing it through the duct work, essentially heating an entire are or several small rooms.
Many of these heating stoves also had a surface on which a frying pan or kettle could be placed for cooking and may have incorporated an over to one side that used the deflected heat from the furnace chamber to cook food. The problem was, the heat in these stoves was difficult to control and anything being cooked had to be watched constantly to prevent burning of the food.
Ventilation Required For All Indoor Heat Sources
Whether using gas, oil, propane or some other form of fossil fuel for heat, the exhaust from the combustion has to be vented outside the home. Even the wood burning heating stoves had to have a chimney to carry the smoke out of the house to prevent smoke from building up inside as well as to vent the deadly carbon monoxide to the outside.
Another major problem with heating stoves is that the outside of the stove gets extremely hot, by nature of its design, and anyone coming into contact with the exterior will be severely burned. Most of them also burn wood or coal to provide heat, which has to be carried into the room and stored for use when the fire begins to die, causing somewhat of an indoor mess.
Despite their messy and dangerous nature, heating stoves are still popular today, with some designed to burn compressed wood pellets, providing a hotter flame with less fuel than burning wood or coal. They, too must be vented properly and a complete chimney has to be in place before lighting the first flame.
