Ben Heck's Chimney of the Future

[@muh1h1]

i like that you did a full project in one video again, thumbs up!

[@KaletheQuick]

You should make a 3d printer that uses plaster of Paris! :D It would be like the powder deposition ones, but it would trickle bits of water. Doing some experiments on making plaster dry faster would be fun to watch. And exploring a 3d printer type we have not seen before would be awesome :D

[@maxime22000b]

nice idea !!!

[@azyfloof]

Very good idea! Perhaps use a hackable inkjet printer head filled with water instead of ink. Spray water in the layer pattern you want, spread a thin layer of plaster over while slightly raising the print head, then print the next layer. Repeat. If you actually used ink, you could have coloured models :O We must test this!

[@MrGustavoselem]

it takes too long to get solid for a 3d-printer.

[@KaletheQuick]

***** I don't watch community.

[@MrGustavoselem]

Gordon Chin well, another idea would be use uv light, but i think we are going too deep in ben's skills. But it would awesome anyway

[@AzureFlash]

Dave Jones imitation is spot on! lmao "That's a bobby dazzlah!"

[@pepzi_]

Like sex on a stick, Bob's your uncle! Catch you next time!

[@joiseystud]

Azure Flash lol @ 8:22 - "That was a long plane ride"... if he was here. Ben has a funny thought process. Love DJ too...

[@s28400]

There are lots of ways you could "reclaim" the heat. I think that a method using coiled metal pipes inside the chimney or even as the chimney itself with water pumping through it would prove to be both more efficient and versatile. The water could be used to power radiators to heat the house, used for showers or baths, and also could act as a form of heat storage after the fire goes out. Another interesting thing you could do is mount some Peltier's with one side attached to an external heat sink on the outside (cold) and a hot water block on the other (hot) to generate electricity. It would be perfect for this small scale model and you could make some mini lamps and or fans for the house as a proof of concept. Also, it would be a great indicator of how long the water holds the heat. Looking forward to the next video!

[@AndirHon]

Old wood burning furnaces used to do that. We removed one from my parents to install a gas furnace. Water would be fed from a cistern to heat in the furnace and it would be used for hot water. It's an interesting idea, but the components used are expensive, corrode, and generally require more maintenance.

[@SdudyoyO]

Pretty interesting idea, it works in concept form, I just wonder if anyone will ever do a full scale test, but congratulations Ben, you turned a Fireplace into a giant heat sync.

[@sparkyprojects]

Old idea, check Roman history, they used an external fire with the chimney passing under the floor and up chimney stacks around the walls, underfloor heating ass well as warm walls In walled gardens in the UK they had fires that exhausted heat through one wall, they grew plants up that wall that needed warmer climates Many houses had a cavity chimney with vents into upper rooms Not forgetting back boilers built into the back of the fireplace to heat water An improvement to standard fireplace heating (coal or gas) would be to have a vent from outside directly into the base of the fireplace to feed the fire, that way you don't get cold air drawn in through doors and windows all the way across the room.

[@homeuser5]

I truly enjoy the bloopers at the end :) Don't ever stop that!!

[@skycarl]

For what its worth dept; Plaster set up times, to accelerate use warm water and or table salt. It will set very fast. To regard the time, cold water and or vinegar. This gives a lot more working time. Old dental lab Carl

[@MikaelMurstam]

This already exists. Most chimneys here (in Sweden) use a slithering pipe with air that absorbs the heat from the smoke and a fan that moves the air. We have this (in Sweden), and it is over 30 years old.

[@MikaelMurstam]

So it is almost like your design just that ours are more efficient because it uses a longer path which gives the air more time to absorb the heat ;). A Masonry heater uses a similar technique by having absorbers made out of masonry invented 5000 BC :D

[@tuforu4]

Thats what i thought,, also i saw somewhere that the INCA IN PERU had underfloor heating system..

[@estidi]

It would make for a cool science project for kids though.

[@cobo811]

Ben, you should make a robotic arm for your next project! A 4-axis robotic arm would be a fun and useful tool to add to your workshop. With just a few servos, steppers, and of course some hot glue. I'm a mechanical engineering student at Clemson University and would love to help out!

[@MrHolozip]

I'm usually immune to your skits, in an eyes rolling "oh dear" kind of way - but the splinter voice cracked me up - well played :-)

[@dav1dh0ff]

I've thought about this so many times! Glad you tested it. I always assumed that it wasn't already done this way because of creosote buildup or something, since I'm sure others have thought of it too.

[@notman05]

A friend of mine had a very similar thought (reclaiming some of that lost heat). He already had in floor heating, but to reduce costs, he ran a coil, in the base of the fireplace, to help heat the infloor water. I never heard the final result, but I think it's a more solid concept.

[@PatFarrellKTM]

Going to miss Alyson. Best of luck in your new endeavors. Ben, the best improvement to fireplaces is to pipe in outside air for combustion.

[@MrZenerTech]

This is great. I've thought about this issue for -many- years. Another idea I came up with a long time ago was reclaiming the heat lost through the clothes dryer vent.

[@stophnerf]

KZbin "jamie hyneman home improvement", he goes into a lot of detail about what he did with his fireplace to make it more efficient. Its a while since I watched it, but if I recall correctly, he used the residual heat from the fireplace to water-filled copper tubing in the chimney, depositing warm water into a chamber underneath the house's foundations, which heats the air that passes through existing ducting in the house. Pretty ingenious! Think he also made a neat solution for a fire grill without using wire mesh, so you get all the safety of a grill but you can still see the fire.

[@novar0gue]

This is awesome! I would have added an additional vent on the opposite side of the room to heat it up more quickly and efficiently. I'd like to see this in real homes if it works. It seems to work perfectly fine with the model. Great Job Ben!

[@NoTySir]

I like how we went from petroleum jelly to plumper dogs, then to big red. LOL. Well played Ben. We were all thinking it

[@GhostofTrufflePast]

Great video! I've always wondered about something like this, just never actually came around to testing it.

[@iamvonimmel]

I love your random banter Ben! QUICK! NOW DO SING THE JG WENTWORTH COMMERCIAL!

[@TboneLoyal]

Very good idea. I wonder tho about draft as the chimney has to be so many feet above the top of the home to catch draft so it naturally drafts up and out putting a draw in the house. Wound love to expand on the thought.

[@ziaride]

Friend of mine built a stone fireplace with a chimney that zig zags back and forth about 6 feet. Where the chimney was further apart on the sides he built vents with flat rock to passively draw more heat out. That thing works so well the smoke that comes out is luke warm and 2 logs can bake you out of the house.

[@BillySugger1965]

Great project, good first start, but I'm not convinced you've cracked it Ben. I think another run with some improvements is definitely worthwhile. You certainly showed increased heat near the vent outlet, but the temperatures in the "room" away from the vent did not seem significantly increased. This suggests that while you have succeeded in distributing the furnace heat differently, you have not made a measurable increase in efficiency. There are a couple of easy efficiency improvements you can make. First, use counter flow, meaning force the air you want to warm in the opposite direction to the heating flow. As you have it, the exit air is at no higher temperature than the flue gas after it's given up its heat. Using counter flow, you get a greater temp difference between flu gas and warming air along the whole chimney, and the exit air temperature can get closer to the temperature of the furnace. This transfers more heat than your first method. So simply turn the fan the other way, and force the room air down the outside of the chimney instead. Secondly, while you correctly identified that more heat is transferred through a greater surface area, your brick "fins" added thickness to the heat conduction path, which increases thermal resistance. Think of heat energy as current, temperature difference as voltage and thermal resistance as electrical resistance. To get the greatest energy transfer, (current), use the maximum area, the minimum thickness and material with the greatest thermal conductivity. So try a simple plated steel or a copper tube for the flu, instead of plaster bricks. I'd love to see what a difference this makes, and if you run your control test again (the ambient conditions for this second test cold be quite different from the first), I'm sure you'll see a significant increase in room temperature. Also, make a minimum one inch black circle with a marker pen where you want to measure temperature, as thermal imaging cameras work best with surfaces which reflect the least IR light. This will also give you consistent measurement points. God luck!

[@Electromech]

Insurance companies would hate to see this! In case of chimney damage, this would be a hazard. I've seen comments about having copper pipe coils in the chimney. The chimney needs to be cleaned regularly because of soot deposits, so this wouldn't be practical. In some cases, there would even be enough heat to damage the coils. Having that built into the chimney wall though, might be viable. But you don't want this system to cool down the chimney too much, or we're back to problems with soot accumulation. Chimneys and fireplaces are quite the touchy subject.

[@crakkerjakked53548]

It would be pretty awesome to be able to connect peltiers to the vent ducts and use the heat being radiated as energy. It would also sap excess heat from the ducts keeping them from over heating which allows for use of a wider range of materials that could be used.

[@bibledave1]

Someone else might have already said it, but this is the same basic principles as a forced air furnace system, very popular here in the Great White North (Canada). But the wood burning feature is a great touch. I like this

[@trentonjennings9105]

Maybe a masonry heater would be a better idea. Some people call them a Russian Fireplace or Swedish Fireplace. They have huge thermal mass and a convoluted path for combustion gas to exit so that the mass is more efficiently heated. You build a short roaring fire and then the heat from the thermal mass heats the house through the night. But Ben, I really do like your series of videos. You have a unique combination of smarts and creativity. Please consider this idea for one of your projects: In my community and others the county and/or private tree trimmers/landscapers have piles of wood chips to get rid of. You typically can get them for free for garden mulch, etc. I would like to design and build some sort of feeder (screw conveyor?) to feed dried wood chips into an outdoor heater that circulates hot water to a heat exchanger in my existing hvac system. I would use arduino to automate the process. This would free me from the hard work of cutting and splitting firewood. What could be better than free fuel?

[@tmar23]

You could increase it a bit by making the fireplace a sealed unit while pulling the combustion air from outside.

[@ThoolooExpress]

Aaron Lee Kafton Even so, if you really want to heat your house with wood, you need a stove or a furnace, fireplaces lose a lot of heat up the chimney by their design.

[@thatguyontheright1]

My dad did this in the house he built. The floor is concrete, but mostly hollow. It has tubes from the fireplace in the floor to circulate the heat through the floor.

[@LouesSCat]

You know to do this kind of experiment right you need to do it again with your air circulatory in place but turned off. that way you can judge whether or not all those electronics are worth it, or whether sticking a bit of pvc pipe around your chimney will conduct heat around your home just fine on it's own :p I strongly suspect the piping is actually a better heat conductor than the air.

[@spinycrayfish]

You need a stirling engine fan on top of your fireplace to circulate the air. Those little gadgets are sorcery! :D

[@ebprogrammers5409]

The eficiency of the chimney can also be tested with the output of heat from the top of it. The colder, the more efficient it is, because that means the heat is being used inside instead of escaping from the top. Im impressed this test was not included. Also, the tube is too direct, the hot air is passing too fast by the tunnel, i would add more contact surface in the inside by using a radiator shaped tunnel, of course i would first test if it doesnt interfere with air flow to the exit and if the smoke is not throun to the inside of the house because the smoke cant go up... it would be a matter of calibration. Nice attempt though! and good idea!

[@ryancrawford3144]

Hey Ben, cool idea have you seen any of the stuff on rocket stoves and heating with them?

[@PowerSports]

Ben, Do you rent your workshop? Do you find it more cost-effective than owning one? Thanks!

[@LenHarms]

this is known as a heat exchange in furnaces, usually made from copper I believe, the burners fire into the heat exchange then out through the chimney and the cool return air is circulated around it and forced out into the home, it divides the room air from the burning air as burning natural gas or propane would fill the home with carbon monoxide

[@KJHamblin]

This is like a bigger version of a wood burning fireplace insert such as ones made by Lopi. There is a metal fire box that is close to airtight (aside from a small vent to pull in air to keep the fire burning) and when the firebox reaches a certain temperature an electric fan kicks on that pulls air in from the room circulates it around the very hot fire box to heat it and then blows it into the room.

[@VacFink]

It does capture more of the heat from the fire, but it doesn't prevent the pull of air from the rest of the home (which cools the rest of the house). To do that you would need an alternative external air source. An interesting test would be to put an intake from the other cold side of the room, or externally. Also, a flex tube to vent outside would keep the garage door closed :) A fun experiment.

[@nevermnd001]

Interesting concept, though at the same time one would have to take into account the energy expenditure of the fan (probably not huge in a real world case, but still worth considering)-- and, as well (and ah ! I was slightly disappointed to not see this, as in the end it is an electronics project), you really need some sort of sensors surrounding to detect for levels of CO2/CO. Not that one would necessarily 'expect' leaks (but usually the fumes 'just' rise up and out, with no risk of them being pumped back in... But of course one does not want to consider the possibility your chimney could kill you in your sleep !

[@7markhunter]

It would have been quite easy to determine how efficient your system is. But to do this you measure the heat escaping from the chimney, that's all you need. So you put a fairly efficient bomb calorimeter over the chimney escape, this will measure the total heat lost from the chimney in the control. I.e. number of joules. Then you repeat with the capture system in place. Then subtract. Conservation of energy will tell you that there should be LESS lost heat from the chimney in the capture version because you are reclaiming it into the house. You can easily calculate the fraction (and thus efficiency) you are extracting heat from your model fireplace. What is happening in the house is largely secondary and is entirely a function of the efficiency of the distribution system, insulation of the house, and the air seal of the house (which you were apparently not interesting in for this preliminary experiment. Which is just fine.) I would say your concept has merit only because a non-reclaiming system is SO poor that your fairly terrible attempt at reclaiming heat is much much better than doing ZERO. But once you realize that the efficiency of the system is determined only by the change in heat losses from the exit of the chimney you will realize that your system is very very very inefficient. Probably in single digits %. The reason is obvious. Your chimney material is an excellent thermal insulator. Additionally for air-based convection-convection heat exchange you need high surface area on BOTH sides (the inside of your chimney is no good, and must be so to meet building code, creosote etc). If you want to have any chance of making it into the double digits efficiency exchange, you have quite a bit of work to do. Metal surfaces, combined with larger surface area (either by traditional heat sink methods or by increasing the travel path length) would be obvious places to start. It's kind of funny, but in your model experiment, basically the critical variable was the thermal conductivity and thickness of the material forming the chimney column. This was the determining factor of how well heat would make it from the hot column of combustion gases into the reclamation column. You are lucky you used plaster, if you had used metal with nice surface area, you would have captured so much heat you would've melted your driving fan in a handful of minutes (assuming it's plastic). LOL. As soon as you realize the physics of scale experimentation, you will come to the conclusion that your experiment was REALLY insanely ill conceived and much more care and precision would be required to figure out how much heat you can salvage from combustion gases in a real fireplace. Consider the combustion gases in your "scale" experiment are about the same temperature as combustion gases in a real fireplace. Knowing the laws of heat transfer scale equally with temperature difference and transfer thickness, do you think it makes sense to have the same combustion gas temperature in your scale fireplace as a real one, but with maybe a 7 mm chimney wall compared to several inches of refractory material in a real fireplace? Physics fail. Your experiment could easily have been off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude in either direction because you didn't use any math in determining how to conceive of the translation of full scale physics to scale physics for your application. Sorry for the bad news.

[@xKatjaxPurrsx]

Ben, i think you needed a second control test where it was just having a fan somewhere in the fake house without the "heat recycling system". I think just having some air circulation in there would help spread the heat around the (fake) room.

[@eLJaybud]

This is why they invented back boilers and radiators. Had a chimney in the corner of our hotel room in Bulgaria. Had to open the balcony door to stop ourselves overheating.

[@pyramidcomics]

Bens test if scaled to full size would cause a Cold Chimney problem which prevents the ambient updraft created by the drop in air pressure from the bottom to the top of a chimney, and is often insufficient to exhaust the smoke from a fire. In colder weather, a unused flue can fill up with low temperature, high density air which can completely block the flow of smoke up the chimney. When this happens, any attempt to light a fire will result in a house full of smoke.

[@maxime22000b]

You could also use the arduino PID library to regulate the temperature. (or a dedicated PID regulator).

[@DanGiese]

You might have creosote build-up. I've tried various things with draft's on wood stoves and boilers and it always came up. But then you are not effecting the burn are you with your rig? ....

[@AshleyJeudy]

Hey The Ben Heck Show What oscope do you recommend for beginners or hobbyist?

[@EmmittBrownBTTF1]

drive the air down next to the chimney. Does not require extra pipe work to bring the air flow to floor level, and the heat exchange will be more efficient around the chimney.

[@thecaffineman]

Wow really awesome project ben! Would love to see how it would work in a real home?

[@502deth]

this is basically how an oil or gas furnace works anyway. the fire goes in the bottom, and comes up through tubes (think of them as small chimneys) then out the chimney. another old standard was to use stack heaters. again, a series of tubes set in the chimney, that got hot as the furnace worked, and then forced hot air through the tubes, spreading the heat. (google search "heat reclaimer")

[@Rouverius]

The future is now! Yeah, I think they call this a chimney/fireplace heat exchange. Great model to show how it works.

[@ScottBeebiWan]

Say "All your base are belong to us." in that Spliter Voice. LOL

[@Stephen1455]

Can I ask you is that a rental unit, I have nowhere to do stuff like this in my townhouse and always wondered if a rental unit was doable financially?

[@scottperry5724]

I wonder if you put a pump system in there to make a radiator system of some sort would be any better? Have a holding tank inside the chimney, and the pump would run water out of it, circulating water around through in a circle, with exposed parts at key places in the room or house.

[@colinstamp9053]

Surely it's a bad idea to try to take heat away from a chimney? They work because they are hot. Cooling them down reduces their effectiveness at sucking carbon monoxide out of the room. The condensation on the perspex in the test shows that combustion products had been spilling into the house. Mind-you, I think there was condensation in the first test too, so perhaps the chimney just didn't work too well - either because chimneys don't scale down well or because there didn't seem to be a vent for the draught air.

[@ZAKKORD]

Wow, you really have no idea what you're talking about. Condensation has no correlation with combustion products, have you ever rode a bus during winter ? frosted windows ? i guess the bus has a chimney in it too. have fun inhaling all those fumes.

[@colinstamp9053]

ZAKKORD Think about what you're saying. Condensation is water. On your bus, that water comes mainly from the breath of the passengers and sometimes from wet clothes etc. Crucially though, where you have condensation, there is always a source of water getting into the air as vapour. How many people were inside the box in Ben's experiment? Where on earth do you imagine the water was coming from to cause the condensation? I'll give you a clue. Water is a major product of combustion. If the water vapour was leaking out of the fire into the "room", then the other (less benign) combustion products were too.

[@ZAKKORD]

Colin Stamp Nice try but your argument is invalid here because Ben used waxed pressboard, all of the moisture that accumulated on the window came from the air that was inside, and the air that came through the holes on the front door.

[@colinstamp9053]

ZAKKORD Your comment about air from outside causing condensation betrays quite a fundamental lack of understanding about how condensation works. I won't go through all the physics of it here but I suggest you do some background reading on dew points and relative humidity. The upshot is that increased ventilation of a heated room will reduce condensation inside the room, not increase it. There is of course, one possible water source besides the fire - the chimney itself, made of plaster. We aren't told how well Ben dried it before running the tests, so we'd be totally guessing at how much water it was releasing into the "room". The chimney, if working properly, should cause enough ventilation to clear any water vapour from the box anyway. The fact that is isn't doing that is a clear indication that the chimney isn't working as it should. Finding out why the chimney isn't working would need more tests, but if I had to guess, I'd say that it's not due to Ben's heat-exchanger setup. More likely that the draw of the chimney doesn't scale in proportion to its physical size.

[@StoneFlange]

Colin Stamp ZAKKORD Whether we have proof or not, extracting thermal energy from the flue gas will decrease its temperature, prevent it from becoming less dense and ultimately inhibit its ability to escape. The resulting backpressure would force the products to a path of less resistance (the model room). My theory on the increased condensation follows from the fact that the second test was done after the shop cooled for 30 minutes during the first test. The ambient temperature on the outer side of the Perspex window was simply colder...

[@rainbowsalads]

Their needs to be an air inlet from the outside for oxygen (airbrick) The fire could also get its needed oxygen from another air inlet from the outside underneath the fire, so the fireplace could be sealed with a glass front to prevent gas from getting into the room. Baffles above the fire, inside the chimney would capture the heat and allow more heat transfer to fins you made around the chminey.

[@tsltyler]

Nice Idea! I would like to see a project involving an LCD or DLP Projector in some way! Any Ideas?

[@MariaEngstrom]

I would have used a material with a lot more heat sinking properties for the inner tube in the chimney. I suppose even a cast iron sleeve would work. I don't know how different metals react to the fire, I guess there's a lot of corrosive bi products in the fire bi products, but no chimney is gonna last forever anyway. Plaster seems way to isolating and porous and does not pass heat good at all.

[@Rickmakes]

A modern home furnace is typically 90% efficient or higher. I would try building a furnace with a heat pump on the exhaust to extract every last bit of heat.

[@funkyant]

Only hole I can poke in this test, is that it looks like the output of the vent was routing through the fireplace and out through the chimney, hence why the left side was colder. Air had to have been coming into the device from somewhere in both tests. How does a real house with a chimney deal with fresh air input to fuel the combustion process?

[@henrywsnow]

Have you thought to try this again with designs to go big scale?

[@polischuk16]

Hey Ben, nice project. You mentioned mythbusters testing this out. Funny enough Jamie Hyneman has a video where he talks about his home projects including his chimney and the way he managed the heat circulation. Look it up on youtube, pretty interesting!

[@ВлаткоБ]

What do you use to get thermal image?

[@kedwa30]

What to do differently: power the fan with a Stirling Engine. You can also power a small generator with the Stirling Engine which could be enough to power a circuit, but in general you would not need a circuit since the Stirling Engine would only run when there was a heat difference. And it would run faster the greater the heat difference.

[@Johnskiqu]

I think if you switch the regular fan with a turbo fan, use the exhaust from the fire with a small electric motor to add spin power to the turbo, and then turns the fan to circulate the air, would that be a fun idea?

[@camerinfigueroa7875]

I would add some sort of metal mesh towards the top of the chimney shaft and route heat from it to the vent

[@jimmysgameclips]

This guy could be a mythbuster

[@seanhornibrook]

this sort of used to be a thing - back when people still heated their homes with a wood burning stove with a metal exhaust pipe - they sold little sections of pipe with a fan in a doughnut shape in the piping to blow air through the hot section. this of course would be a LOT more efficient but yeah great idea

[@DillysADV]

I may just have to try this idea with my shop since i am working on a heat system there as well.

[@occultworks]

I would have liked to see a control with a non heat-sinked chimney. Also, to expand, add the heat-sinking to the inside and outside of the fireplace as well to try and pull even more heat out of it.

[@thatotherguy27]

Why does the fireplace chimney run inside the enclosure? Most fireplaces I've seen have 3/4 of the brick exposed outside the house. Capturing that heat - the truly wasted, "we're not paying to heat the outside" (except you are, dad) heat - will see the greatest improvement.

[@RoloFilms]

These kind of chimneys already exist! My partners parents have one in their home. :)

[@TilmanBaumann]

I know you wanted to show off that IR camera. But thermocouples throughout the "home" would have been the more realistic and actually interesting thing. Because fireplaces radiate heat but do nothing to heat the air.

[@danz409]

cooling chimneys from stoves that burn coal or wood could lead to some disasters. it causes creosote to condense on the inner walls and build up. over time leading to house fires. i would only use this on a clean fuel burning stove ONLY, (or just take very good care of your chimney by cleaning it bi annually, very cool idea though! :D

[@s0nnyburnett]

Nice to see a project that isn't all printed out.

[@rdoetjes]

I wonder where insulating the 'pvc' to keep the warmth in more and I return will increase the warmth at the vent.

[@orlandd]

I'm sorry, why don't you use a reverse air flow , from the top to the bottom of the chimney? I think there will be a better exchange of heat by the fact that the air from the ambient will be following the heat rising of the surfaces of the chimney..

[@rick601a]

Might be interesting to pull this air from chimney into another enclosure to simulate another separate room. See how well the chimney heat will heat another room that doesn't contain the actual fire place

[@PaulFosterrebuilds]

Ben I think it would be interesting to put an actual thermostat in the room, so you can see what the temp change is in the farthest part of the house. other than that its pretty interesting.

[@XXSNIPERUKXX]

I think if you ran hot water pipe around it,it would be great for heating water more efficiently or maybe as part of the central heating system

[@MetalHermit83]

yes, this has been the main staple of heating houses for a very long time, they use gas furnaces and pump hot water through pipe rigs, they are very safe and awesome at heating, especially the 1950s and below homes, the water heaters are like works of art.

[@norffmancusthelp1088]

It would distribute much more evenly with a dual vent system, planting the second vent opposite the original vent.

[@Rodox2k10]

"How do you feel about big foots, Alyson?" "Fire places are cool". Wow! Way to go, now we're kicking off 2015, Ben! Speaking of which, Alyson, pease don't go! We'll miss you! :-(

I don't understand the point of this video. Don't you guys have reclaiming chimneys in the US? These are kind of the standard in northern Europe if you build a chimney... It's not exactly a tube like design, but rather the inside is shaped in a zig-zag and the heat is transferred usually to the central heating system of the house to assist it.

[@Renuclous]

Its a good idea but there are real world limitations to the theory. If your heatexchanger is to efficient so the smoke cools down too much, the "chimney effect" of warm air rising up and pulling fresh air into the fire can be neglected or weakend so much, that in the worst case your room starts filling with CO and CO2. Modern Fireplaces actually use similar methods and reuse the hot fumes in the fire to reduce carbonmonoxide exhaustion and increase fireefficiancy, but always have the mentioned risks in mind.

[@yahz91]

what type of scale is that ?

[@ScruffyKiwi99]

So what's the difference between this and your fire warming radiators within a home?

[@magna59]

Domestic bliss .................... Dear Ben , 1 ) first generalisation . In well though out systems of fire installation air is ducted in from outside to ensure that room heat is not taken to drive the fire . 2 ) The burning of fuels is a mixed bag , if you for example burn wood , the material that may condensate out on the chimney lining , be it creosote , or humidity turning to water , trapping ash & filling , reducing / blocking the chimney . I must admit , it ' s nice to see this work , but may be , leaving the chimney un ducted , even insulated , but have a top of chimney heat exchanger , be it air to water , or air to air & pull the heat off at one point , that could be easily pulled out to clean . Regards Bob

[@ncamen68]

why didnt you use the heat that comes directly from the fire?

[@jimbit22]

if you cool the chimney down creosote will form in larger quantities than normal causing fire in your chimney

[@sherrattsp]

How come you dont get smoke in the model house

[@CoryBeutler]

There has to be a point where too much cooling would cause smoke to not escape the chimney. That could result in dangerous carbon monoxide buildup. Also, the slower smoke ascension may result in a dirtier chimney. Cool idea though. Definitely worth more research.

[@BenjaminEsposti]

+Cory Beutler Check out the "rocket mass heaters" ... they are really awesome! And they use a small fire, but the design causes it to burn very hot, which is what you want... so hot in fact that it doesn't produce any smoke! :)

[@gideonfubar]

Ever heard of a rocket stove, Ben? There's a bit of hyperbole around them, but they do seem to work better than a standard fireplace. Also there are european homes that simply run the whole chimney around the house... Fun project though, playing with plaster looked fun.

[@ratdude747]

The issue I see here is the heatsink/transfer element would need a lot of cleaning, as there would be quite a bit of soot/creosote buildup over time. This could also make the fireplace harder to sweep.

[@sykotheclown1]

Jamie from tested/mythbusters said he did this for the fireplace in his own home. But he had it circulate through his furnace system instead. Great minds think alike.

[@MSI2k]

Nice project, Ben. But damn it, we want to see more of Alyson.

[@rikzel]

In stead of sucking the air up on the first floor I would sent the air from the ceiling down through the chimney pipe, as hot air rises you'll be pumping already hot air through a hot pipe, wich makes it even hotter.

[@kd1s]

Two suggestions - a cake decorating bag and tips or a ziplock back with a corner cut off makes a really good plaster distribution method. The other - high temperature epoxies do exist.

[@MysticKnight38]

big problem with cooling down wood smoke in a chimney is you will get a creosote buildup. Then you will get all the fire you can handle.

[@OmegaTeam15]

Well, this system already exists.. not as develloped as yours, but in france every chemeny uses this system, to heat all the rooms where the chemeny pipe goes thrue. Still a very good idea, and a good project :)

[@LordZordid]

He should do voice acting on the side. He is amazing.

[@cajunag]

Coil copper pipe around the chimney that then runs under the floor of the "house" in a zig-zag pattern. Through this pipe, run water. The water will be heated by the chimney. It should also retain its heat longer than air would so even after the fire goes out, it will still heat the home.

[@1stKwestionable]

This tech is ancient! Haha. I believe the Grand Hotel here in Cali leads heat through channels to heat some of the rooms.