Smoke and Mirrors

Central heat wasn't really a thing in the 1890s. This house had one fireplace on the 1st floor, and... that was about it. A three-story house heated by a single wood fire. Fortunately, home builders in that time were clever. They knew full well that heating a tall, narrow house would be difficult, so they designed it so the heat traveled up the staircases to the upper floors. And if you open the windows on the 3rd floor, you create a nice chimney effect that draws the heat upwards. So a single fireplace wasn't such a bad deal.

Nevertheless, it looks like the early Harts doubled up and added a big cast-iron "parlor stove" for additional heat. It sits in the 2nd-floor dining room. It's a heavy beast, and it must have given off a lot of heat, judging by the look of it. We don't know for sure, because we don't use it.

Can't use it, in fact. It's not safe. It's a "Moore's Air Tight Heater" model No. 403B, built by the Moore Brothers Company of Joliet, Illinois. The company was founded in 1852, and a little online research reveals that the No. 403B was patented in 1893 -- the very year this house was built. So it's possible that the parlor stove was here from the beginning, but we assume it was added shortly afterwards.

At any rate, it used to burn coal, which is obviously a non-starter today. Somebody later converted it to gas, with a new firebox inside and a grate filled with lava rocks. The stove vents to the house's brick chimney through a long, circuitous flue pipe that's mostly hidden up in the ceiling. There's a gas line at the bottom and a "Blue Flame Log Lighter" inside the firebox.

The day we moved in, the local PG&E utility man came around to switch on the electricity, take meter readings, and turn on the gas. We asked him to make sure the gas to the parlor stove was working, too, but he laughed, shook his head, and said, "Oh, hell, no! I'm not lighting that thing. Tell you what: I'll get in my truck and when I'm two blocks away, you can light it!"

So... that's a no? Later on, we checked with two different fireplace and HVAC companies, and they both turned us down, too. Their major complaint was the flue pipe. It's not double-insulated, and it's not far enough from combustible materials. So our Moore's Air Tight Heater No. 403B is jut a conversation piece.

That being the case, we didn't see any reason to keep the unsafe flue pipe in place, so we removed it and covered over the hole in the ceiling. Ninety percent of the flue pipe is still there in the dropped ceiling; it's just capped off to stop drafts or to prevent sparks in the chimney from escaping. We haven't done anything irreversible if some future generation wants to re-light the parlor stove.

The next step in our plan is to clean and paint the metal tiles directly behind the stove. They're there to reflect heat into the room, but since the stove doesn't get hot, they're now entirely decorative. The tiles were painted flat black at some point, but we're planning to repaint them gold, to complement the new tin ceiling tiles.