You always tell yourself that a fireplace saves energy. Right? That’s how it’s supposed to work. By heating your house with a fireplace, you can turn down the thermostat on the old heater and save cash.
The only problem is that it doesn’t save very much energy at all. In fact, despite their great beauty and attractiveness to home buyers, fireplaces pretty much just suck conditioned air out of your house and cost you more money. This is especially true in the summer months when you really want to keep all that cool air inside.
Enter the chimney top damper. It goes on the top of your chimney and actually does double duty. First of all, when you cover up the top of your chimney, you keep things out of your house. That goes for birds, bats, snakes (yes, really), leaves and more.
But rather than just capping the top of your chimney, these new dampers have gone another step to provide an insulating and tightly-fitting seal around the opening. This keeps the inside air inside, and the outside air outside.
Here’s the part I really thought was cool. They’ve added a steel cable that drops down the flue of your chimney allowing you to open and close the chimney top damper from the inside. That means that you can use it throughout the year. Anytime you aren’t using your fireplace, you can crank it down and seal things up nice and tight. Whenever you’re ready to light a fire, just open up the damper to let the smoke escape.
Chimney top dampers let you keep your gorgeous fireplace without having all your energy savings go up in smoke!