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Have a gas fireplace? Here's how to keep your home from freezing this winter.

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Have a gas fireplace? Here's how to keep your home from freezing this winter.

A gas fireplace tip if your fireplace has a remote control.

Josh Centers
Dec 3, 2022
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Have a gas fireplace? Here's how to keep your home from freezing this winter.

www.unprepared.life

I woke up at 4 AM to a cold house and a loud whirring noise. I dragged myself out of bed to figure out what was going on. I walked downstairs and found that the fireplace was on. What was happening?

woman in gray long sleeve shirt sitting on floor beside fireplace
Photo by NATHAN MULLET on Unsplash

Our central HVAC unit is an all-electric split unit: the main machine is in a utility closet and it’s piped to a heat exchanger outside. A pump attached to the indoor unit collects the condensation and regularly pumps it to a tube outside.

Yes, those are butternut squash. Where else would I put them?

The room adjacent to the utility closet is underground, and so stays damp. To prevent mold and mildew, we run a dehumidifier at night. In order to not have to manually dump out the collection bin, I ran a tube from the dehumidifier to the HVAC pump.

Usually, that setup works brilliantly. Water from the HVAC and dehumidifier is collected in one box and is pumped out automatically. But that doesn’t work when it’s 25°F outside and the outside tubing is frozen solid.

When the pump can’t do its thing, it runs constantly, and while it’s running it draws power from the thermostat, so it’s effectively kaput until the pump stops. And the pump won’t stop until the water has been pumped out.

Fortunately, getting the electric heat working again was simple enough: I disconnected the dehumidifier and drained the water from the pump box. Et voilà, the heat was back.

But why was the fireplace on?

A year after we moved into this house, I realized the old propane fireplace was leaking, so I had it replaced. The replacement was a fancy model with a remote control. The remote control has an automatic thermostat option: set a temperature and the remote kicks on the fireplace when the temperature drops below a threshold.

It just so happened that the remote was sitting in line of sight of the fireplace, so when the central heat failed, the fireplace kicked on automatically. If not for that bit of serendipity, who knows what sort of frozen disaster I would have woken up to.

So, my tip to you: if you have a gas fireplace with a remote control thermostat, set that sucker up so it can kick on the fireplace below a temperature. 69°F is a nice threshold. That way, if you have a bizarre chain of disasters or simply a power outage, your house stays warm, or at least not frozen.

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Have a gas fireplace? Here's how to keep your home from freezing this winter.

www.unprepared.life
3 Comments
Cia Parker
Dec 5, 2022Liked by Josh Centers

I love the photos next to all the titles in the archive, it makes the list very attractive and user-friendly!

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Kevin Wenzel
Dec 3, 2022

The penultimate sentence made me chuckle. Another cool thing gas fireplaces can do is run even when the power is off, since most have battery backup capabilities. It's worth verifying this, since (I've found) they don't always have the battery pack wiring kit installed and of course might simply have dead batteries.

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