Every woman ought to know all the dangers connected with furnaces and how to remedy them. The following may aid in this duty:
When a furnace does not draw well, it often is owing to the stoppage by fine ashes or soot, and then the smoke-flues must be cleaned. The fewer and more simple the smoke-flues the less this trouble will occur. Sometimes the shaking of a furnace makes cracks in joints, and this causes outflow of gas and also diminishes the draught.
When iron is very hot, it burns the particles floating in the air, making an unpleasant smell and dryness. A large furnace, therefore, is better than a small one that must be kept very hot.
Water should be evaporated in large surfaces, and so as to deposit dew on windows.
Heated air passes off by the shortest courses, and it is often the case that the more distant rooms thus warmed have no ventilation and little renewal from the furnace air, and this is often shown by a fetid smell.
Furnaces where air is heated in the furnace-chamber by coils of steam or by hot water, though costing more at first, require much less fuel, and do not involve the evils of warming by hot iron.
The safest and pleasantest way of warming a dwelling is by steam-coils, provided there are fire-places or hot-air flues to carry off bad air. Without these, this is the most unhealthful mode of all, as there is no fresh air brought in, and what is heated is breathed over and over, till it is poisonous.
The want of care in regulating the dampers of the airbox often makes a house cold, however great the furnace fire. A strong wind requires the dampers nearly closed, especially when it is on the side where the air enters from without. Every furnace should be supplied, not by cellar air, but by air taken through a shaft from a height, and so more pure.
Remember that an open fire, or an opening into a hot-air flue, will ventilate properly in all seasons and all weathers. The opening should be at both the top and bottom of the room.