Fantasy Fireplace

I have two gas fireplaces in my house. In our previous house we had two wood burning fireplaces. Word burning fireplaces are a pain. You get to deal with wood: buy, haul, split, stack, protect from the rain, carry it into the house. Starting the fire is fun, and watching the wood burn is enjoyable. But then you get to deal with the ashes, shovel them out of the fireplace, carry them outside and dispose of them. Wood burning fireplaces are a big pain. Of course if you have a truck, or even just a trailer you can drive out to the national forest and cut your own wood for free. That is if you can afford the gasoline, which as we all now know depends on the whims of the gods of gasoline prices.

We only used one of the fireplaces in the old house. When we built the new house, we opted for a gas fireplace. Did not want the hassle of a wood burner. And when we finished the basement, we opted for another gas fireplace. Of course at this point putting in a wood burner would have entailed some major structural changes.

But every now and then, when the economic news looks particularly grim (Natural Gas prices up a gazillion percent!), I think that maybe a wood burner might have been a good idea.


This leads to thinking about living off the land and building a cabin in the woods using nothing but an ax and my bare hands. (Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen. That's why the title is what it is.) So if you're going to build a cabin in the woods, you are going to need a fireplace made of rocks. Given what we know about fireplaces, would it be worthwhile to try and design a better fireplace made of rocks? I like to think it would.

First of all, the fireplace would be in the center of the room instead of in one wall. Once a fireplace gets warm, it is going to radiate heat in all directions. No sense radiating heat to the outside. Second of all, build a channel to conduct outside air to the fire, so you are not pulling heated air out of the room. Third, build the fireplace over a big pit, with a door to the outside so you don't have to clean out the ash but once a year. I suppose the biggest improvement would be putting doors on the fireplace so as to make it more like an stove, but making doors out of stone that could be easily moved might be a bit of a trick. Might could use a couple of ancient Egyptian stone masons.

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.