Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1874 — The Size of Chimneys. [ARTICLE]

The Size of Chimneys.

One great fault in the construction of chimneys is that they are too small. This is the more noticeable when coal is used, as the soot will soon fill up a small flue. For a six-inch pipe the general rule is to make the flue inside the size of a brick, four by eight inches, but a much better rule is to double this as the smallest size permissible. In order to estimate the size of a flue, we must first consider the number of stoves or vent-holes that are required. We will suppose that there are two rooms in the cellar, and that the chimney rests on the cellar bottom. We shall then need two pipe-holes in the chimney; say two on the first floor and two in the chambers. This makes six. Now six times sixty-four is 384 inches. That will make the chimney sixteen by twenty-four inches inside. Such a flue will carry all the smoke, and do a large amount of ventilation. In the wintertime, in case there is no stove in the room, a stopper should be used to prevent fire from falling soot. If the cookstove does not draw good, you may be pretty certain that the difficulty is a too small flue or too small a pipe. A nineinch stove should have a seven-inch pipe, as our soft coal soon fills the small pipe with soot. My cook-stove has a seveninch pipe and a flue twelve by twentyfour inches; and we never think of taking it down to clean it, as it never gets foul. A neighbor was very much troubled with a smoky stove and the want of a good draught, and two or three stoves had been condemned and sent back for the want of good baking quality; but it was discovered that the flue was too small, and filled with soot, and the only remedy was to reconstruct it. This time it was made large, and the difficulty at once disappeared. Stove-dealers begin to understand this, but they have a difficult time in convincing their customers of the fact.— “ Rural," in Chicago Tribune. It is stated that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company contemplate such a change of the face of their stock certificates as will very materially narrow the ability to raise the number of shares, if it should not entirely prevent that species of fraud. It is proposed to have the denomination in the center of the face of the certificate, printed in large letters in colored ink. With this guide any raised certificate would be detected by the receiver at a glance. A California baby recently died fatness.