Q: My husband is considering installing a vent-free gas fireplace in our living room. As a retired school teacher, I'm familiar with the effects of the
CO2 gases exhaled by 40 students in a 1200 sq.ft. classroom. If we didn't open several windows top and bottom to provide fresh air inflow,
symptoms of the beginning stages of CO2 poisoning (drowsiness, lethargy, etc.) would overcome my students and myself quite rapidly. Our living
room is only 400 square feet, so I'm concerned about the CO2 emissions from the unvented fireplace. I asked a local fireplace salesman to compare
the CO2 output of a 30,000 btu vent- free fireplace to the amount of CO2 exhaled by an average person, and he said he had no idea. Do you?
 According to the Code of Federal Regulation - (Labor 29, 1900 - 1910.99), an average person at rest exhales around 5 liters of air each
minute, and the exhaled gases contain CO2 at a partial pressure of approximately 40 mm Hg.. This calculates to slightly over half a cubic foot of
CO2 being released every hour by the average human at rest.
Using this average, your 40 students were exhaling approximately 20 cubic feet of CO2 into your 1200 sq.ft. classroom every hour, or about 1/500th
of the total breathing space volume.
A 30,000 btu/hr vent-free fireplace releases nearly 27 cubic feet of CO2 into the breathing space every hour, the equivalent of the amount of CO2
produced by 54 people at rest. Since your living room is only 1/3 the size of your classroom, the percentage of CO2 saturation would reach about
1/120th of the total volume of the breathing space during the first hour of operation, or over four times the saturation you experienced in your stuffy
classroom (imagine cramming 54 students into your living room! ). Exhaust from the second hour of operation would have an even more dramatic
effect on your air quality, as it would blend with the already-polluted results from the first hour, and so on.
Sound kind of oppressive? It gets worse: don't forget that the flames from the vent-free fireplace would be consuming oxygen from the room at the
same time, while lacing your remaining air with other nasty substances like carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.
A fireplace is an easy place to install a vented gas insert, since it already has a chimney extending through the roof. A typical co-linear vent kit for a
15' fireplace flue only costs around $300.00, and improves the room air quality in two ways, by drawing combustion air down the chimney instead of
from the room PLUS venting the gas exhaust up the chimney and out of your breathing space.
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Read about
a recent study of the effects of
long-term exposure to CO gases
Read about
respiratory irritation from
vent-free exhaust in the breathing space
Read a posting about vent-free gas appliances
from an indoor air quality scientist
Read
what Consumer Reports Magazine has to say about vent-free products
Read letters in defense of vent-free products
Read our opinion about vent-free gas
appliances
Read about
a 2016 ASHRAE standard that
could eliminate the entire vent-free product category in the US
Have a vent-free experience you'd like to report? Here's a link
to the Consumer Product Safety Commission
website.
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