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'Draft dodger' cuts to the chase

Gary Dymski | Home Work

December 16, 2004

I reached into the drawer for the tools of my trade -- drywall saw, utility knife, pry bar and hammer. She shuddered. This was going to be dirty and ugly. I looked into her ocean-blue eyes. "Are you sure about this? "I want my fireplace, she said, her voice desperate. "At all costs.

So we begin the second chapter of the mystery of my drafty fireplace. I play the hard-boiled private investigator. Instead of murders and mayhem, horrors of the house fill my case file. My wife, the dame who shuddered at the sight of those sharp, wall-damaging tools, is my client. A Nov. 4 column, "The big freeze, or farewell, my chilly, introduced the current case: The prefabricated fireplace in our 1996 two-story home has a viciously cold backdraft. The lower the outside temperature, the more cold air is sucked through the fireplace opening because it is built into a poorly insulated chase, the outside enclosure also called a doghouse. This turns the house into a large chimney, with warm air being pushed out. Last winter, in an effort to prevent this backdrafting, I covered the fireplace opening with shrink wrap, the clear plastic film that insulates drafty windows. My wife has said this winter there will be no "Saran Wrap.

Since the Nov. 4 column, several readers have contacted me about their own drafty fireplaces. One of them was Brian Kampe of Setauket. He and his wife, Christine, own a house built in 1999. The Kam.pes' fireplace is identical to mine, a Heatilator model EC42.

"We started to notice cold air blowing inside from the fireplace the last couple of winters, which were colder than normal, Kampe said. He first stuffed rags into the damper. It helped, but just a little.

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Like me, Kampe considers himself a bit handy. So he went on a mission to find out why his fireplace allowed so much cold air to enter his home and to determine if he could eliminate the problem.

He tracked down the contractor who installed the fireplace and was told that it was the builder's responsibility to insulate the chase properly. Then Kampe squeezed into his attic from a second-story access panel. He was able to look into the chase from near the roof line. Not surprisingly, he found that the chase was open -- wide open.

According to Heatilator's installation instructions, an insulation collar should be placed inside the chase at the height of the ceiling. The collar should surround the vent pipe to limit the amount of cold air being sucked into the chase.

"No such collar was installed, and I could see all the way down to the ground level, Kampe said. Also, fiberglass insulation batts had been placed in the studs along the interior wall, but no insulation was used around the wall of the chase. "It was just wood sheathing.

Sometime very soon, Kampe is going to attack his chase. He's going to insulate; his wife, like mine, can't take another Saran Wrapped winter. The cold air had been so noticeable that Kampe used shrink wrap around his patio door and on several second-story windows. And Kampe's wife, like mine, desperately wants a fireplace that makes a room cozy and warm.

In the meantime, I'm going to cut to the chase myself. Luckily, the interior wall around our fireplace is plain, ordinary drywall. This month I will be removing a large portion of that wall to see what evil lurks behind the chase. I expect to find pretty much what Kampe found on the interior of his. But will adding a collar and insulating the bare chase with fiberglass batts be enough to prevent that icy-air backdraft?

John Gulland, a consultant in wood-burning who lives in a small Canadian town about 100 miles west of Ottawa, warns: "You might be better off using a half-stick of dynamite on the existing fireplace and starting over.

But tough-guy PIs like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer didn't give up against insurmountable odds, did they? They checked their gats, pulled their fedoras down tightly and went forward into the cold, dark night.

Look out, chase, I'm comin' in.