Keep Your Home Warm With a Masonry Heater

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

“The fuel load burns for about an hour and a half and is allowed to simply burn to ashes, Matesz says. “When there is no more sign of fire, the chimney damper is closed, and when the last coals turn black, all air supplies are 100 percent turned off. A couple hours later the sides of the exterior of the heater begin getting hotter and hotter, usually hitting a maximum of about 150 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat from these warm surfaces is what radiates throughout the whole surrounding living space,” he explains.

Building your heater

In 1994, Matesz helped build a masonry heater at Slippery Rock University in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, and in 1995 he built a Finnish contraflow masonry stove in his own home. Matesz and his wife, Nancy, built the central core from standard firebrick and the exterior from solid red brick.

Matesz is one of only about fifty members of the Masonry Heater Association of North America (MHA), a nonprofit organization that promotes the heaters. The MHA also runs a heater mason certification program so that individuals throughout the United States and Canada can find masons well versed in the most up-to-date requirements and methods for building efficient and long-lasting appliances. For a list of MHA-certified members, visit www.mha-net.org.

To build a masonry heater in your home, you need to plan ahead. Materials must be custom ordered to fit the size and design of your home, floor plan, and stylistic preferences. Plan six months to a year in advance, as there are so few certified masons in North America.

A World of Choices

A Finnish heater is characterized by its upright appearance and has an exit to the chimney at its base. It has twin downdraft heat-exchange channels on either side of the fire core.

A Swedish heater, also very upright, usually has a chimney that exits from the top. Like the Finnish heater, it has twin downdraft channels on either side as well as twin updraft channels on either side.

A Russian stove is longer and narrower than the previous two. Its firebox is deep as opposed to upright. The Russian heater typically has several horizontal heat-exchange channels above, rather than next to, the firebox.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print