Selects: How Fireplaces Work

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Limitations apply. SPEAKER_09: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_03: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerome the Jares. SPEAKER_09: So this is Stuff You Should Know. Jerry got a piece of mail the other day that said Jerome. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Did it have— I think it's like real mail. Yeah? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: Did it have— Like real mail, though, right, Jerry? SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I don't know how that happened. SPEAKER_08: Oh, like mail mail, not like fan mail? SPEAKER_09: Oh. Well, Jerry just said, confirmed. SPEAKER_08: Weird. We've been doing a lot of this Jerry translating lately. Yeah. That's really weird. That's bizarre. I mean, I sold your address to a mailing list, but I've never been reimbursed for it. So, how are you, sir? SPEAKER_09: Great. We are fresh off our live shows in Boston, Mass. SPEAKER_08: Right. Ma. And Washington, D.C. D.C. And big thanks to everyone that came out. Those were a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure. And thanks to the Brightest Young Things for having us to the Benson Ball with Tig Notaro and all that. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. It was wonderful. We got to meet Tig. She was just as nice and nonplussed as I would have hoped. SPEAKER_09: Exactly. She didn't make a fuss. No. Nor should she. SPEAKER_08: Wait. I mean that in a good way. Wait. Isn't nonplus the opposite of what you think it means? I don't know. How do you know? I think nonplus means like you're agitated. SPEAKER_08: It means you're plussed? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: I'd learn things all the time on this show. Yeah, me too. This is my favorite part of my job. And most specifically, the most recent thing I've learned, Chuck, is that fire, the use of fire, the technological application of fire, that's as far as I'm going, actually predates humanity. SPEAKER_09: That it was Homo erectus who was the first upright hominid who controlled fire. And it was as long ago as a million years. There's evidence of the controlled use of fire by humans as much as a million years ago. Yeah. It says here in this article that you found that in China there are hearths of clay, silt and limestone from like a half a million years ago and signs like you said in Africa over a million years ago that people – and these are in caves, so essentially an indoor fireplace. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_08: Right. Yeah. But – and if you are an anthropologist, you are familiar with the term hearth, but that's usually used to describe something that doesn't really resemble the hearth that we'll talk about today. SPEAKER_09: Usually it was like just a shallow depression. Maybe it did have some limestone or some clay or something else to keep it from catching fire, but nothing like the fireplaces we know of today. The ones we see and say there's a fireplace, they're actually about 700-ish years old. Yeah, and I think the history of the chimney isn't super clear, but by the 14th century in of course Europe when you had a little dough, you could then afford the nice chimney or maybe just any chimney. SPEAKER_08: Well, actually yeah, people started to afford chimneys quite a bit. There was – especially in say jolly old London, there was a lot of chimneys that sprung up. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, they weren't happy about it, right? A lot of problems that arose as we'll see later on. Yeah. But yeah, it's kind of interesting to see the fireplace hasn't really changed much in like 700 years. Eh. And then you step back and you're like, no, actually that's kind of evident when you think about the fireplace and how ridiculously inefficient it is. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's kind of changed. I don't know, it depends on what your definition of changed is. SPEAKER_09: A hole in the wall with a hole above it that's tall and narrow and leads to the outside. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, within that there have been a lot of changes. SPEAKER_09: Sure, sure, but the overall general design has been relatively unchanged for 700 years. It's like toilet paper. Yeah, they're not as straight as they used to be. Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life. SPEAKER_08: He did. About when, you know, he was just the kind of person who would look around the world and his everyday surroundings and say, why do people do it like this? That's stupid. I'm Ben Franklin. There's better ways. Listen to me. Take a peek under my silken robe. SPEAKER_08: Sure. He very famously wrote that on the back of the Declaration of Independence. But fireplaces used to get under his skin apparently because the design, and we're going to talk about this, the traditional fireplace is fairly wasteful. SPEAKER_08: Oh, tremendously so. And it can even make your room colder. Yes, which is... Counterintuitive. Yeah. It's like nonplussed. Yeah. I looked that up, by the way. So nonplussed, I'm correct. The nonplussed means you're agitated. SPEAKER_09: Well, it means that you are surprised and confused to the point that you are unsure how to react. So not necessarily agitated. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_08: Okay, gotcha. But you're definitely not just like laid back. SPEAKER_08: No. So Tig Natar was not nonplussed. She was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which was, hi, nice to meet you. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, hey, how's it going? SPEAKER_08: Yeah, she's just chill. Right. And very sweet. Yeah. I didn't expect like some big show, trust me, from anybody that meets us. SPEAKER_08: Well, no. SPEAKER_08: So I just want to put that out there. I didn't want to sound like I was disappointed. SPEAKER_08: She didn't like throw those snapcrackers and start tap dancing? No, I got exactly what I wanted, which was a very nice lady who gave me a big hug and a photo. I think that's come across. Yeah. I'm sensitive to that stuff. Once I start opening my mouth, digging that hole. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_09: You know what I mean? Here's a little more rope. SPEAKER_08: Anyway, let me give you a stat here. SPEAKER_08: Wait, first, I think everyone wants to hear about how you felt when you met Tig Nataro. I was super excited. Can you tell? How was she? SPEAKER_09: So here's a little stat for you. The National Association of Home Builders did a survey. SPEAKER_08: And I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of 77% of home buyers say. SPEAKER_08: And that's, I guess- In the U.S. Yeah, like even in, I mean, that's accounting for the hot places as well. Sure. You know, so I would imagine in the cold places, it's probably more like 100%. Yeah, well, remember, I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about how in New York, it's very gauche these days to have a fireplace that you use because it's so wasteful. SPEAKER_09: Now, does gauche mean what I think it means? Now I'm doubting everything. It means super laid back and not plus. Oh, so like New Yorkers are like, oh, you have a fireplace? Yes. SPEAKER_08: How not green? SPEAKER_09: Right. Which I mean, they're correct. There's a lot of ungreenness associated with fireplaces. SPEAKER_08: Brownness. Sure. You know? Especially as far as like air pollution goes, air quality. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Eating efficiency. There's a lot of problems. Sure, there's a lot of problems that come out of it. Like, for example, I guess if we're going to talk about this for a second. If you are a kid and you have, I don't know, respiratory diseases, you're far likelier to be living in a house where your folks burn wood. So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be brought on because smoke's going to get in the room no matter how great the fireplace is. Right. Or if you're, let's say, if you already have asthma or something, you're not doing yourself any favors by letting that smoke and the particles particulate. Yeah. And also, I mean, like house fires, there's like 25,000 house fires in the United States every year that result in like 10 people's deaths. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Directly from fireplaces. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. But no matter who you talk to, for the most part, people say, still worth it. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm going to die of like black lung and my house may burn down before I get a chance to, but I really love fires in the winter and I'm willing to take that risk. SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_09: So you know my deal, or do you? I don't know. We live in a house that was built in 1935. Oh, yeah, yeah. And we're renovating it still forever. SPEAKER_13: Yes. SPEAKER_08: And we have the fireplace that is not used. I know. And it's not able to be used. I know. Unless we pay like some pretty good dough to get it retrofitted and the chimney worked on. SPEAKER_08: And I, for years, have been leaving just little sticky notes and I'll write it in crayon on the bathroom wall and just little things like, hey, Em, how about that fireplace? SPEAKER_08: And she says, quit writing on the walls. Right. We're not getting a fireplace just yet. But maybe. SPEAKER_08: We've been there for like ten years. SPEAKER_13: When do we start living our life, is my question, with a fireplace? SPEAKER_08: Have you considered trading something she wants for the fireplace? It doesn't work like that. No? No. Have you considered begging? SPEAKER_09: That doesn't work either. Oh, wow. I don't know what to tell you. SPEAKER_09: Well, you know what I'd do. I'd wait until she goes out of town and I'd just do it. And then they just do it yourself. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_08: But do it in a terrible way so that somebody, a professional has to come in and do it. SPEAKER_08: A professional has to come in and go behind you. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: And then you have no choice. You're like, oh, I've got to get the fireplace guy in here now. SPEAKER_08: There's a giant hole in the wall. SPEAKER_09: Long story short, though, we still don't have a fireplace and I'm still, despite all the SPEAKER_08: negatives, and I try to lead a green life, but I just want that wood burning thing. SPEAKER_08: Sure. I don't want. I don't blame you. We'll talk about the substitutes, but, and that's great if you're into that because they are better in many, many ways. Sure. But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I'm not a fireman in that particulate matter. Yeah. On my lungs. You and 77% of US homeowners. Yeah. So, yeah, most people do say I'm willing to look past the problems for a wood burning SPEAKER_09: fireplace, but like you say, there are, there are, there's alternatives. SPEAKER_09: That's right. But we're going to talk about all of it here. Should we talk about the parts? Yeah, let's talk about, this is, this is when I say like there's very little change to the design over 700 years ago. It's true, man. Yeah, I didn't realize some of these parts existed, so I did learn quite a bit in this. I thought it was pretty much the firebox and the flue that ran up the chimney. SPEAKER_08: Sure. And that's it. Right. But there's more to it than that. Well, yeah, these are, I think these are the improvements that came over time. So you do have that hearth that you mentioned that's going to be built out of something fireproof. SPEAKER_09: You don't want a wood hearth. No, that'd be bad. It's probably rock or brick and that's where you. SPEAKER_08: Paper mache. That's where you sit and drink your bourbon while you warm your back. SPEAKER_08: It's like an apron on the floor that extends out from the fireplace. SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_08: Yeah, and it can be even with the floor as is the case now or the one I grew up with, I grew up with one of those Mac Daddy huge rock stone fireplaces. SPEAKER_08: Those ones are like, man. And you could sit on the thing. They're the best. They are the best, but they're also like just kid killers they look like, you know? SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_08: Well, not if you don't climb in it. SPEAKER_09: Oh, okay. SPEAKER_09: Which I never did. Yeah, that is pretty nice. What else you got? Well, so you know, like the hearth extends out, but if you look usually up the walls along either side of the hole in the wall and then above it, that's called the surround. It's usually made of something either that's the same as the hearth, same material as the hearth or some other fireproof thing like tile or brick or stone. And that's just to basically prevent that fire from licking out of the firebox and setting SPEAKER_13: SPEAKER_09: the house on fire. Right. So straw, no good as a material. You have your firebox. That is just what you think it is. SPEAKER_09: That's the square typically, although they're shaped a little differently now. SPEAKER_08: That's the square that holds your fire. Right. And it's where the smoke starts to collect. Yes. What you're setting this stuff up to behind the firebox is actually called the smoke chamber. SPEAKER_09: And there's a transition area in between the firebox, which is where you actually have the fire, and the smoke chamber, which is above and slightly behind it. And it's called the throat. It's the opening that connects those two things. Yeah. And the smoke chamber, smoke box I think I've been calling it, it actually connects the firebox to the flue. And it's got some pretty cool stuff going on. This is like where some improvements were made to the design. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and the flue is surrounded by the chimney also, again, not straw. Right. It's going to be brick, almost always. In the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's concave. Yeah, because if you look at a fireplace, you just think it just goes straight back SPEAKER_09: and up, right? Well, some of the old designs did. SPEAKER_09: Well, they were stupid. Yeah, that's how it's changed some. Right. So if you look at the back of the fireplace, if you could stick your head up into the firebox. SPEAKER_08: You don't want to do that. When there's no fire. You don't want to do it, period. SPEAKER_09: You'll see that there's actually a shelf up there. Yeah. And it's angled forward too in front of that. Like I said, it used to be just sort of a cube and it went straight up. SPEAKER_09: Now it sort of zigzags back and forth a little bit on its way to the flue. SPEAKER_08: That's right. So the whole point of that shelf and the zigzag is so that when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. Yeah. It's almost basically a protective overhang. SPEAKER_09: And it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff from falling into the firebox too. SPEAKER_09: Correct. That smoke shelf underneath it, you're going to have the damper. And that is that covering that's movable and that separates the firebox from the place above it. SPEAKER_08: And that keeps, that's, you know, when you don't have your fire, that's when you close. We used to say close the flue. Right. And we didn't use the word damper in my house. Yeah. I don't know why. But that's technically what it is, is the damper. And you get your, there are different mechanisms. But ours had a little eyelet circle thing that you would stick, we used our fire poker. SPEAKER_08: And we would just unhook it and then close the damper. And that when your fire's not burning, you want to keep that thing open when it's burning, obviously. Well, yeah. You're going to find out really quickly. Yeah. If it's closed. It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure. You know. No, it's got a throat. SPEAKER_08: Why not? SPEAKER_09: Sure. SPEAKER_09: What else do we have? SPEAKER_09: Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the flue. Yeah, I hadn't heard of this. That you could close too. It's unnecessary. Oh, you think? Sure. All right. But then at the very top of the chimney, there's something called a spark arrestor, which is usually like some sort of mesh grate that will allow like gas and air out. SPEAKER_09: But will keep little embers and stuff from going out onto your roof and setting your house on fire. Yeah. Especially like paper tends to float up. Sure. The chimney cap serves the same purpose and that a lot of times is one and the same. SPEAKER_08: Like the chimney cap and the spark arrestor all one piece a lot of times. Right. Is that it? I haven't heard of this ash dump. That sounds pretty neat though. Sure. It's basically, I guess, a hatch in the floor where you can just sweep the ashes, I guess. That sounds like in the olden days when your house was built onto bricks and it would just drop into a bucket below as would your poop. Sure. There were different buckets under your house. Right. That collected things. You wanted to make sure you knew which bucket you were grabbing at any given time. That's right. You didn't want a surprise. And then finally, you got your little door. It's either glass or metal or it might just be a screen. SPEAKER_09: We never had, in mine growing up, we never had the glass door scene. SPEAKER_08: Sure. Just the screen. We had one of those in my high school house. We had a gas fireplace. Yeah. It was fine. Sure. But I was like, this is not wood. SPEAKER_09: All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk about wood after this. SPEAKER_08: I'm Lauren Brag-Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of SPEAKER_02: Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. SPEAKER_05: Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers. During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that fluish feeling. And then the next morning, I'd be fine. Then he started getting nodules on his body. SPEAKER_00: He had been to so many different doctors and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications. SPEAKER_01: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get SPEAKER_06: your podcasts. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by National Car Rental. SPEAKER_09: National knows the way we all work has changed. Business can happen from virtually anywhere now. But that said, there's nothing like being there. That's right. 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And we're going to talk – this would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about basically the physics of how a fireplace works. Yeah. Because there are some physics involved. Yeah. Pretty impressive ones if you ask me. Yeah, I love this article. It said, lighting a fire inside your living room – and it kind of hits home like how kind of crazy that is. Right. And it said there are two challenges. One, not setting your house on fire. Two, keep the smoke from entering the room. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. But, yeah, never really thought about it. And everything we just talked about basically was to prevent the first part, catching your house on fire. SPEAKER_08: Right. The surround, the hearth, all that stuff. Yeah. But then if you get a little more into the guts of the fireplace, that's to keep the smoke from filling up in the room. SPEAKER_09: And when you look around your house, you'll find that there's a lot of different places for air to get in. And that's actually quite necessary for a fireplace. It's quite necessary for living and breathing. Sure, for breathing. It's important for that too. But to keep a fire going and to keep the smoke from filling up your living room. Which, again, you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your damper open, which I had before. Sure. If you have air coming into your house, then you can keep the air, the smoke from the fire going up the way it's supposed to. Right. And that happens simply because heat tends to rise. Yeah, you know, one of the places I get a nice flow of air in my house is from closed windows. Oh, yeah, you got thin windows? SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_09: Yeah, we have it. We've only redone a few of the windows. SPEAKER_08: That's on my must-do list is to get all the windows replaced. Yeah. But it ain't cheap. No. SPEAKER_09: But you're going to earn that money back over time with efficiencies. SPEAKER_08: But, yeah, I have those old windows. It can be fully shut and you can stand and your hair will blow. Right. And I'm like, where's this coming from? It's going through the glass, it feels like. It's defying the laws of physics. Yeah, it's freezing near my windows. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I remember, you and me had a house like that and it was, I mean, the wavy, vaguely wavy kind of windows. Yeah. Yeah, those were thin. SPEAKER_08: It's kind of neat, though, to think that in 2016 I'm living like a settler, basically. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. In parts of my home. Churning your own butter. So, yeah, you want to talk about the different kinds of heat? SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So you've got conduction, convection, and radiation. And fireplaces use convection and radiation, but not conduction. SPEAKER_08: Hopefully not conduction. SPEAKER_02: No, conduction means your house is catching fire. SPEAKER_08: That means you're literally touching something hot. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. But convection, of course, is when that hot air is circulating to cooler areas of your home, in this case. And the radiation is just literally feeling that flame warmth. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's a, in the case of the fireplace, it's infrared and visible light electromagnetic radiation, basically. SPEAKER_08: There is actually some radio waves and some microwaves produced by a fire, which is kind of cool. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. But for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation and you're seeing visible light radiation, right? Yes. So when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being emitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection. Yeah, big time. And, yeah, big time's right. Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is moved through a fire. Yeah. And because you want to keep the smoke out of your house, you're also actually keeping those convection currents from going into your house as well. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Meaning, as Ben Franklin pointed out, because remember he was a huge complainer, that most of the heat from a fire is just purposefully being funneled out of the house up through the flue in the chimney. I think it drove him nuts a little bit, looking through some of these quotes. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, because he really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a fireplace better. SPEAKER_09: You've got to understand, though, too, when he was alive, these weren't just for, like, charm. No, no. SPEAKER_08: They were to, like, stay alive. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. SPEAKER_09: And the idea that you were wasting all this fuel, I think probably part of it also was the inefficiency. Probably drove him nuts. Well, yeah, I mean, he's dead right. Like, you've got so much heat just going right up the chimney. And not only that, when you get that draft, because the fire needs the oxygen. Right. So that's another reason it's pulling this air in. But it's also pulling in, you've got your thermostat on and your heat going. SPEAKER_08: Sure. It's pulling some of that warmer air in and up and out as well. Right. And even air that it's warming through convection, like that's being irradiated out of the fireplace, it's being sucked in. And as a result, again, when that air is sucked into the fire and is pushed up the flue through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. SPEAKER_09: It's creating what's called a negative pressurization, right? Yes. And that means that air wants to come in and replace the air that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So cold air from outside is being drawn in, which is how, like you said before- My windows. Right. Sure. But the fire can actually make your house even colder, because it's pushing the warm air out through the fireplace and sucking in cold air from the outside. Yeah. And it's not, it says here, here's a stat that said that a traditional fireplace can draw four to ten times as much air from the room that it needs to actually burn that fire. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, something like 500 cubic liters of air a minute. Yeah, so compare that to like the smart fireplace, aka the wood-burning stove. Aka the TV with the fire burning on it, right? SPEAKER_09: I love a wood-burning stove, man, those are great. SPEAKER_08: D, I've never really been into those. Yeah, I mean- I got no problems with them. It's not a, it doesn't, it's not good for every home. SPEAKER_09: Aren't they incredibly dangerous? SPEAKER_08: Like they get super hot, right? They're really hot. SPEAKER_09: So like if you fell onto one or something, you'd be in big trouble, right? SPEAKER_08: Yeah, you don't put the skateboard next to it. SPEAKER_08: Okay. Or the banana peel. Okay. Step one. But, and you know, you're not going to have like a super modern house with a wood-burning stove, like it's a little more charming in your cabin or something. SPEAKER_08: Actually, I was looking through, I think, a Popular Mechanics or something, it had different types of stoves. SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah? Wood stoves. And there are some that are kind of mod. Oh, well that's cool. Yeah. So they're trying to bring it into the future? SPEAKER_09: Yes. Well, they're remarkably efficient. How much did you say, 500? 500 cubic liters, I believe, of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace, an average fireplace. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, and only 20 for a wood-burning stove. Yeah, that's pretty efficient. So they're super hot, you can cook on them too, you can boil your water and do all sorts of things. SPEAKER_09: Sure. You know? Just don't touch it. No. SPEAKER_08: I think the Randazzos had one in their place in Connecticut. Oh yeah? Yeah, and I think it supposedly works super well. Sure. Like it'll heat a room and then some. Yeah. You know? Well, and the reason why is because it's like a contained fireplace, but it's not just, you know. SPEAKER_09: Wide open. SPEAKER_08: It's out in the open. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, you shut the door to it. Right, you shut the door to it, so you're saving the warm air around it from being sucked in, right? SPEAKER_09: Correct. And then it's also removed from the interior of the wall so that it can heat on all sides. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's right out there so you can fall on it. SPEAKER_09: Sure. And then the flue itself can go up and then out of the room so that the hot gas that's being carried out can heat the air in the room around it. Uh-huh. So you've got. That stovepipe? Yeah, you've got a lot of different ways the air is being warmed in your house by a wood stove. Yeah, I'm going to look into these new ones. There's new ones. There's also like very, there's some famous ones that are like mid-century design that are super mod. Oh. Swedish ones. And then there's like, there's ones that look kind of like the traditional ones, but they're newly built and like they're improved designs. Remember the old 70s fireplaces that were like orange metal that would sit out in the room? That's the Swedish one I'm talking about. Oh, really? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: It's based on that old 70s look. No, that's the one I'm talking about is the 70s one. Oh, okay. Yeah, but there's newer ones too. Gotcha. But that iconic orange one, yeah, that's. Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: Like my friend, one friend in high school, Chris Booten, had the most 70s house. SPEAKER_09: Is that right? Oh, dude, it was wonderful. Yeah. Like it was the orange fireplace surround, like built in a terrarium set type of deal. SPEAKER_08: Wow. With plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall. Was there macrame? Oh, I'm sure there was macrame at some point. But it was just, it had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I like those. You know? SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And looking back now, like it's a super cool, like mod house. SPEAKER_08: Like people now would be like, oh my God, it's preserved in time. SPEAKER_08: It's the greatest thing ever. Right. Like his, he had a waterbed, of course. SPEAKER_08: But one of his walls, his entire wall was like a blown up photograph of like a Hawaiian SPEAKER_08: sunset. Oh, we had a couple of those in our house. Not a Hawaiian sunset, but we had like a forest with a waterfall going through it. And then in our kitchen, a forest mural. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: No water. That's very ice storm. Yeah, I've not seen that movie, but I can imagine. Great movie. Because it was 70s, right? Is that in the 70s? Yeah. I mean like key parties are happening and people are drinking eggnog around the orange SPEAKER_08: lacquered fireplace. SPEAKER_09: Nice. It's a wonderful time. But let's say you have just the regular, regular old fireplace to start. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Right? Traditional brick. SPEAKER_08: You want to, you come across it, you say, what the heck is this thing? What do I do? SPEAKER_08: Well, the first thing you do is you log onto the internet and go to How Stuff Works and SPEAKER_09: look up how to operate a fireplace. Because How Stuff Works has you covered, man. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I could say this would probably be good for is if you've never, SPEAKER_09: literally never started a fire. But it seems like common knowledge to me. Yeah, there's some details in there that, I don't know. SPEAKER_08: Like hardwoods, right? You don't want to burn pine or any softwood. Okay. You want your hardwoods like hickory, ash, oak, that kind of stuff. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. SPEAKER_09: And you want it seasoned. That's the key. Yeah, you can't go cut down a tree in your yard and chop it up and burn it the next week. That's not going to work. Because it will smoke and you'll see, literally, I mean, when I go camping, we get rooked all SPEAKER_08: the time on firewood purchases. Oh, yeah. And we sit down for the evening, throw the wood on there, and you just start hearing SPEAKER_08: the sizzle. Yeah. And we're just literally boiling out of it. Right. And we're just like, oh, man. Well, okay. That roadside guy, I'm going to go back. Here's how you tell. Going back this time. You got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch him squirm. You take two logs. Yeah. And you knock them together. SPEAKER_08: Mm-hmm. And what you're looking for is a hollow sound, no thud, hollow sound. SPEAKER_09: Then you know it's seasoned. Yeah, but he would go like, city boy, this is North Georgia loblolly pine. SPEAKER_09: You don't know what you're talking about. You'd say, well, pines of softwood, I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods? I went to college. SPEAKER_08: Get off my property and leave the boiled peanuts. Right. You'd say, I'm going to take half of the boiled peanuts for my time. Yeah, I feel like we always get wet wood, but at least six months, you want that wood SPEAKER_09: drying out. SPEAKER_08: They say a full year. SPEAKER_09: What you're looking for is 20 percent moisture level by the time you're burning it. Right. SPEAKER_08: You could also put in a moisture level temperature or moisture indicator in the end. Yeah. There you go. Did you buy the big city? Right. You look at the ends of the wood, too, and you'll see that it's cracked and split. SPEAKER_09: It's usually dark, like gray. It just looks aged. SPEAKER_08: But the dead giveaway is the hollow thud sound. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I didn't know that, so I'm going to try that. The hollow thud, or the, I'm sorry, the hollow sound, not the thud. Right. That's what you're looking for. So you take your fire, or you take your wood, you put it on your fire grate, although, so this is a component of the fireplace. It's not an actual part of it. Right. The fire grate is like this iron stand. It's a grate. There's really no other way to describe it, although some fire aficionados suggest that you should use what are called andirons. Yeah, I like grates. SPEAKER_09: Well, an andiron is basically a grate missing the grate part in the middle. SPEAKER_08: It's basically these two stands, a pair of stands that go in the fireplace, and it holds SPEAKER_09: the logs aloft. Yes, until they burn through. The grate does the same thing, except it keeps burning embers on the grate a little more. SPEAKER_09: The reason why people are like andirons or grates is because however you have a grate SPEAKER_09: or an andiron, you want to keep a bed of embers going, because that is going to eventually SPEAKER_09: become hot enough that you could throw anything on there and it'll start to catch fire. Yeah. So, when you take your split logs, you put them on your grate or your andirons, put a little kindling beneath them, which is like thinner wood that'll catch fire easily. Yeah. Light it on fire. Oh, I forgot. First, you want to pour about a half a liter of kerosene on this to make sure that it starts. No. You do not. Oh, did I misspeak? That is just a joke, kids. SPEAKER_09: You don't ever want to use any sort of lighter fluid or gas or anything like that to start an indoor fire. Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place. SPEAKER_08: True. So, stop right now. Yes. This is for grownups. That's right. But you do want to use something like, I don't know, newspaper or just a piece of paper to light the kindling, but no, you don't want to use any sort of accelerant. SPEAKER_09: Well, people don't get newspapers anymore, so you can just light your Kindle or your SPEAKER_09: iPad. SPEAKER_09: Right. Throw that in there instead. Sure. But that kindling is going to catch, and if your wood is seasoned, it'll catch too, and SPEAKER_08: then all of a sudden, you've got a fire. Yeah, you may want to adjust that damper a little bit to keep your airflow how you want it. SPEAKER_09: Right. And again, when you have a fire going, one of the two main things you're trying to do, SPEAKER_08: in addition to not burn down your house, is to keep the smoke from coming back in the SPEAKER_08: room. SPEAKER_08: And sometimes, that's easier said than done, because every house has something called a SPEAKER_09: neutral pressure plane. Okay? So above the neutral pressure plane, the air is pressurized, so it wants to push air out. And below it, air is the pressure inside the house is lower, so air wants to be sucked in. So as long as your fireplace, your chimney, is above that neutral pressure plane, you're going to be okay. The air is going to want to go in. If it so happens that the air around your fireplace is a higher pressure, then the air is actually going to be pushed down the chimney, into the firebox, and out into the room, which is no good. But you can solve it pretty easily by just opening a window and allowing air to come in, or go out, depending. Or have a 90-year-old windows. Right. Where you don't have to worry about it at all, because the air just flows through freely. So if you want to, we're talking about how inefficient they are, if you want to improve that efficiency, there are a couple of cool things you can do. SPEAKER_09: One is called a tubular grate, and that is exactly what you think. SPEAKER_09: It is, instead of just a grate made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. SPEAKER_08: It looks sort of like a motorcycle exhaust pipes and things. So it's just, they're tubular. So it's going to draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes, and then it's going to rise and then loop back around and shoot out the top of the tubes into your room. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Which should work in theory, but remember, if your fireplace is working properly, it's sucking air from the room into the fire to fuel it, and then shooting it out the chimney, so this air that's being warmed could be sucked right back into the fire. SPEAKER_09: That's right. If you have it so that the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the grate can go out into the room, bam, you're set. Oh, is that a thing? Yeah. Oh, I haven't seen that. There's another thing called a, well, this is when Emily's parents have moved to Georgia now, but when they lived in Ohio, they had one of these recirculators that was a fan, SPEAKER_08: basically. It was a fan on a switch, and it would literally blow heat from underneath the grate back out into the room, and it worked really well, but it always seemed to blow a little stink SPEAKER_08: out with it. Stink? You know, fire stink. Oh, okay. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I mean, you couldn't see smoke pouring out of it or anything, but it didn't... It was still affecting your respiratory? Well, I mean, it didn't affect me so much, but I could tell it was happening. Every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has kind of had the same deal to me, SPEAKER_08: whether it's gas only or whatever. SPEAKER_08: It always just seems to have this, but I'm very sensitive to odors anyway, so maybe that's something to do with it. I don't know. Maybe. SPEAKER_08: I'm a super smeller. Are you a super smeller? SPEAKER_08: What do you smell right now? I smell Knoll like three rooms over. Wow. I smell like a super smeller, because we are hermetically sealed in here. SPEAKER_08: Not true. SPEAKER_09: And then those glass doors you talked about is another way to increase efficiency, but SPEAKER_08: you're also going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much SPEAKER_09: as 50%. Yeah, there's not a lot that you can do to have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of SPEAKER_08: the fire. For the most part, it's going to lose more heat than it puts out. SPEAKER_09: You just want to hope that you can warm the room you're in with the fire enough so that you don't mind. Or if you're just after the aesthetic, then good for you. Yumi and I lived in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years. We were hooked on it. Hooked on it. Wood burning, I guess. Yeah, oh yeah. And we could get that room hot. If you keep a fire going long enough, that's the key. You just have to waste more wood than you can imagine. All right, well, we'll take another little quickie break here and we'll come back and talk about some more options and a very depressing history of child labor. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_02: This is a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and SPEAKER_05: hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers. During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that flu-ish feeling, and then the next morning I'd be fine. Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors and I just felt like they were just throwing a SPEAKER_00: dart at what this could be and trying different medications. You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. SPEAKER_01: Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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That's right, and Ruby answers all of your calls live from right here in the US. They'll take messages, answer questions, route calls, and much more. Visit Ruby.com or better yet, give them a call at 844-900-RUBY. SPEAKER_08: All right, Josh, we've been talking about wood a lot because it's clearly the superior fireplace. Seriously. But you can get the old gas fake log fireplace these days. SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_09: My mom made the switch. SPEAKER_08: Fake logs look pretty good these days. SPEAKER_08: So wait a minute, wait a minute, she had a wood burning fireplace and had a gas insert put in? Yes. Wow, okay. So because she had a, like I had growing up too, the gas starter, so you would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off. So she just retrofitted it, actually I did it, my brother, into full gas with the fake SPEAKER_09: SPEAKER_08: logs. Nice. That they look good these days, you know, you can arrange them yourself in a way that SPEAKER_09: looks aesthetically pleasing. Right, they don't come in that mound that's shaped to look like three logs laying on top of each other? No, it's come a long way, I'll say that. SPEAKER_08: Don't they have beds of embers now too and all that? Yeah, they do. SPEAKER_09: That kind of catch the little flickery glow? SPEAKER_08: Yep. SPEAKER_09: They've come a long way with trying to simulate that look. Pika pika pika. I don't know what that is. It's like the Japanese word for that, like the little tinkling glow. SPEAKER_09: I'm saying it wrong, but it's a throwback. I said it wrong on some other episode years back. SPEAKER_08: Are you talking about poody purty? SPEAKER_09: No, pura pura. SPEAKER_08: Pura pura pura? Yeah, but that's something different. I'll have to go back and find it. Maybe we'll just edit this whole part out. So the gas logs covering the gas vent, you're going to burn that fire behind glass. It's going to give off radiant and convected heat. You're probably going to have an air, not recycler, what do I call it? SPEAKER_09: Exchanger? Air exchanger there working as well. SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and one of the reasons it's so much more efficient is because it doesn't require any air from inside your room. It draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less. So it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to burn. It's just going to say, you keep it. I'm gas. SPEAKER_09: I'm super efficient. I love you in ways that wood could never imagine. SPEAKER_08: Wood is dirty and bumbling. Why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas. So if you're getting a new house, you're probably going to have a gas fireplace. If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably going to be a gas fireplace. SPEAKER_09: That's the direction they're steering you these days. Yeah, oh yeah. I would guess. Because gas. I would guess you're going to pay significantly more for a wood burning fireplace to be built SPEAKER_09: into your new house than a gas one. You think? Yeah. I'll bet there's relatively few, especially down below the Mason-Dixon line, relatively SPEAKER_09: few builders who know how to put in a wood burning fireplace. Yeah, you've got to find a builder from 1973. Basically. Yeah. And he's going to want to give you one of those orange modern jobs that you're like, SPEAKER_08: yeah, this is cool, but no, I want the real thing. Yeah. He's like, this is real? So they're very efficient, these gas fireplaces. Sure. The gas burns cleanly. They even have them that are vent free. But people also say, you know what, if your house is not like Chuck's and it is actually SPEAKER_08: pretty tight, as you would call it, and sealed up, then they can actually deplete oxygen SPEAKER_09: or moisture can build up. So the jury's still out somewhat on these gas fireplaces. I say the jury is in. Oh yeah? And I'm the jury and I say a vent free fireplace is a stupid idea. SPEAKER_09: Pumping carbon dioxide into your house. SPEAKER_09: That's never good. You would think. Yeah. You can get an ethanol fireplace. This one seems like, okay, you've seen them before, right? Like if you go to a Marriott courtyard or something like that, they'll have like the SPEAKER_09: chair situated around a table with a fireplace in the middle of the table. SPEAKER_09: It's nuts. It's just burning ethanol. SPEAKER_09: The flame is actually cold. It's basically like, yeah, right. It's basically like a Sterno fireplace. Yeah. SPEAKER_08: You want to light your fondue pod or something like that from beneath? It's the same thing, I think, virtually. And then you can get the woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace. SPEAKER_09: Well, there's some now where you can get like an entertainment center with like a TV and SPEAKER_08: then beneath it, a fake electric fireplace. SPEAKER_08: It's cool. So an electric fireplace has no fire. It is a heater and it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old. In squinting. If you're a squinty four-year-old. SPEAKER_09: But we don't want to yuck someone's yum, so if that's your bag, then more power to you. It's just not for me. I have to take issue, though, with this article. It says that it's emission-free. It's emission-free on the user end. Right. It's electricity, which means it's producing emissions at the coal-fired power plant that's SPEAKER_08: producing that electricity. Yeah, that is very much. So don't be fooled if you're like, oh, it's emission-free. Nope. No. We're going to yuck that yum. Safety-wise, got to watch out for those sparks if you've got carpet around or hardwoods, I reckon. Yeah. Keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: That's a big one. Might want a fire extinguisher, but don't put it in the fireplace itself. Carbon monoxide investing in a carbon monoxide detector is worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like a smart carbon monoxide detector, although get one of those if you want. I'm just saying, if you're using a wood-burning fireplace, at the very least, get yourself SPEAKER_08: a cheap but decent carbon monoxide detector. Yeah, get a dumb one. Smoke detectors not quite enough. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I think you have to have those now. SPEAKER_08: Isn't that the new code? I don't know. I haven't read the zoning codes in a while, building codes. You should take a look. This is one of those kind of once-a-year things. If you know what you're doing, you can at least get a flashlight and kind of look everything over, see if there's anything obvious, like if your flue cap is no longer on your chimney. SPEAKER_09: Hurricane hit? SPEAKER_08: Yeah, if there are big cracks or anything. So what's wrong with yours? Cracks? Like your house would catch on fire? SPEAKER_08: All I know is the guy did a lot of like, ugh. Maybe he just wasn't feeling it that day. No, he didn't put on a good show. He came over because he's in, their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces. SPEAKER_08: So I thought this guy's going to be like, oh great, this is what I do. He acted like he didn't want to do the job. Right, but that's what I'm saying. SPEAKER_08: He's like, that's a lot of work, man. You're going to have to fix your chimney on the inside and it's cracked here and you got this and you got that. SPEAKER_08: I was like, yeah, that's what you advertise is you fix old situations. Right. SPEAKER_09: You should bring somebody else out. Yeah, I didn't like that guy. I'm going to bring out someone with some little moxie. But you do, even if you think that your fireplace is doing great, it pays to pay somebody to SPEAKER_08: come out and look at it inside. SPEAKER_08: Is it too much to ask for a little energy from your fireplace guy? A little wow factor? Maybe. Yes, you're correct. You do need a pro every now and then to come out. SPEAKER_08: They're called chimney sweeps. And creosote is something if you look up creosote online, it sort of looks like black lava built SPEAKER_09: up on the inside of your chimney. Right, and it itself could catch fire. And you have a chimney fire in which case, and it sounds a little counterintuitive, like well there's fire going through it all the time. Fire going through it is much different from fire, like your chimney being on fire itself. Yeah, that's not good. And if your chimney is on fire, your house can catch fire fairly easy, especially if SPEAKER_08: you have cracks in there because it goes, and all of a sudden some pressure treated SPEAKER_08: two by four is like, oh. You don't want to burn that pressure treated two by four, by the way, it's wood. Yeah. I don't think we mentioned that. Same thing you can burn though, which I wouldn't use, but it's called a chimney sweep log, or a creosote log, and it's just a special log, it's sort of like a Duraflame, it's a prefab log. Right, it's a chemical log. But it's supposed to break down that creosote. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_08: I just, I don't know, something about that made me, my radar went off like, I don't know if that's the best way to do things. Yeah. It's not waterproof, but I hear chemical log that knocks that creosote loose, and it just SPEAKER_09: didn't sound like the smart approach. Well even the Chimney Safety Institute of America says, no, no, like yeah, those things SPEAKER_09: kind of work, but you want like actual scrubbing of the interior of your chimney. SPEAKER_09: Yes. Which is what chimney sweeps did. Yeah, do. And man, if you want moxie in your chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say, SPEAKER_08: I want to buy your four-year-old boy and make him my chimney sweep slave. Yeah, I mean, earlier we teased and promised the child labor horror show, and that's pretty much what things were like in jolly old England after 1666, second September. To the fifth. I'm sorry, fifth September, technically. Yeah. SPEAKER_08: The Great Fire of London changed a lot of things, and one of them was, chimneys were a little bit narrower and they had a lot more rules as far as how clean you had to keep SPEAKER_09: them. SPEAKER_08: And so, like you said, what you would do is you would, you can't put an adult up there. No, not really. But you can put a five-year-old boy. Or four, I think is the youngest I saw them doing. Yeah, so you would literally buy a child from a poor person. Right. Stick this boy up in there. And you would buy your quote unquote apprentice, which basically was child slave. SPEAKER_09: Unpaid child labor. Zero dollars. Right. And actually chimney sweeping at the time, so after the Great Fire of London in 1666, I believe it was mandated by the queen or parliament or somebody that everybody needed their chimneys kept up with. So chimney sweeps became a thing, but they actually swept chimneys free. It was a free service. The way that chimney sweeps made their money was from the soot that they gathered. SPEAKER_08: They would sell it as fertilizer. SPEAKER_09: Oh, I thought you were going to say sponsorships. Like they would show up wearing their Chevy Tahoe jacket or something. SPEAKER_08: It's like, nothing gets your chimney clean like son of a gun by STP. So they would stick these kids in there. SPEAKER_08: Sometimes they would literally light a fire under their butt to make them work faster. The kids would shimmy and distort their body to shimmy in this little 18 inch wide chimney SPEAKER_08: and chip loose this creosote and soot that would then, because they're working above SPEAKER_08: their head, would fall all over them. They would take a bath once a week, maybe once every month, maybe once every two or three months, depending on who you're asking. So these children are literally not, I mean, if they survive this experience at all, they're SPEAKER_09: not going to live past middle age. Right. So what you just described was a good day. There were all sorts of other horrible maladies that could come about, deformation of their skeletons because these kids are like four, five, six, eight, 10, 12 years old. They're trying to grow. They're still developing, but they're spending like hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So their bones, especially the bones in their ankles and knees, tended to grow in a deformed way. Unbelievable. There's something, the first industrial length cancer ever identified, it's called chimney SPEAKER_09: sweeps cancer. Other people call it scrotal carcinoma, where the scrotum was irritated by soot and it would produce warts and these warts, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually, if it wasn't cut out, the tumor would grow into the testes and then into the abdomen and it was a very, very painful way to die. SPEAKER_08: Kids like 12 years of age were dying of scrotal cancer from this. Yeah, you get up pre-dawn and you work till the nighttime hours, 364 days a year. SPEAKER_08: The one day that these kids would get off was May Day, International Labor Day. SPEAKER_08: They would sleep then, we said they collected that ash and soot and sold it. They would store all the stuff in sacks and the kids would then sleep in those rooms, still ingesting all this stuff in the air. SPEAKER_09: And quite often, they would literally get stuck and die in these chimneys. SPEAKER_09: Here's the part where I started to hyperventilate just thinking about this. From claustrophobia? Yeah. There's this thing called positional asphyxia. There's actually a pretty interesting Vice article called, like, a brief history of people getting stuck in chimneys. And they actually illustrate how positional asphyxia happens using the Grinch. As he's going down the chimney, his feet start to get above his head and all of a sudden SPEAKER_08: SPEAKER_09: he's stuck. You can't get out of that position. This would happen to real live English boys, and American too apparently, who would get stuck in the chimneys that they were cleaning out and would die there because they would asphyxiate. Their abdomen couldn't take in breaths any longer. It happened a lot. And actually, finally, it happened enough times that parliament started to get involved. SPEAKER_09: They first got involved in 1788 with the Chimney Sweeps Act and they said, you know what? This is crazy. SPEAKER_09: You guys are buying four-year-old kids. You can't do that. Chimney sweeps can be no younger than eight. SPEAKER_08: That was their first stab at reform. And obviously, child labor was a lot different back then as far as how we thought about when SPEAKER_08: kids should work. Or the idea of childhood hadn't even come about yet. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, but even so, even for a time where it was believed that children should put forth SPEAKER_09: an effort in work, like four and five-year-old kids, it's just ridiculous. Sure, right? They also added though that if you are a master of a chimney sweep, you have to make sure that they are allowed to go to church on Sundays. That was the other part of the 1788 Act, right? Then in the 1840 Act, they upped the age to 21, which was significant, but apparently it wasn't really enforced until 1875 when this one kid died and he was basically the SPEAKER_08: straw that broke the camel's back for the public. Yeah, his name was George Brewster and he worked for a gentleman by the name of William Wire. And I say gentleman, what I mean is a scumbag. And he was cleaning a hospital chimney, a full-born hospital, and he got stuck. And great efforts were made to rescue him. They actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died and Wire was actually found guilty of manslaughter. SPEAKER_08: And his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody and it became part of the campaign. And that was pretty much the end of using kids. He was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England. SPEAKER_09: In England. I guess in the US they kept using him for a while. So shameful. It really is. Now if you see a chimney sweep, tell a four-year-old to go up in the chimney. You call the police because that is illegal these days no matter where you live. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Okay? Let's all agree to that. Agreed. SPEAKER_08: You got anything else? No. Fireplaces. Just in time for the fall. SPEAKER_09: Well, yeah, it's November here in Atlanta and in the mid-80s, so ready to get that fireplace going. That's right. If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light a fire, you can go SPEAKER_08: find that out by typing fireplace in the search bar at HowStuffForks. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this grammar police. Hey guys, regular listener for quite some time. I finally become angered or inspired enough to write in about something. I used the sandwich technique proposed by Chuck recently, by the way. And I was listening to an older episode, Does a Body Replace Itself? And you guys were talking about emails from the grammar police. Grammar only has strict rules to those who decided that it needed strict rules. As a society, we have a rather dramatic ebb and flow of grammar rules. There's no one entity to decide upon the rules, and therefore there's no real right or wrong. You can almost consider it like a fashion in a way. We can all generally agree that double negatives are wrong, much like we can all agree that socks and sandals are wrong. And yet some will still use them or wear them without a problem. As long as we can understand each other and the quote, incorrect, end quote grammar does not take away from the meaning of your words, then it should not matter. There are different times in which proper grammar is necessary and scrutinized. And then there are times when it frankly does not matter. There is a huge debate in the grammar world, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivists or descriptivists when it comes to the rules of grammar. It's a constantly evolving topic, and arguably grammar is a constantly evolving entity. Just thought I'd share my thoughts in hopes that you wouldn't get down on yourselves from the grammar police. And yes, feel free to pick apart my email for grammar errors. SPEAKER_09: Happy face. This is from Colleen Zaker, an English teacher and grammar enthusiast. Thanks a lot, Colleen. We appreciate that. Big time. We always love to hear support from people who are like, don't listen to the haters. SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us like Colleen did, is it Colleen? Sure. Who cares? Actually, I don't know. Goes either way, whatever. Yeah, she said you can call me whatever. Sure. If you want to get in touch with us like Cauliflower did, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. SPEAKER_04: And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_09: For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Have you heard about Vivgard? F-Guard, TIGAMOD, Alpha, F-Cab? Ask your neurologist if Vivgard could be right for you. And learn more at vivgard.com slash learn. That's V-Y-V-G-A-R-T dot com slash learn. Brought to you by ARCHENEX. Hey, this is Jason Alexander for Visible Wireless. You know, some wireless companies say they have no yada yada. But details matter. You should know what you're signing up for. So yada yada, I'm reading this ad for Visible. SPEAKER_11: On the Visible plan, get one line of wireless on Verizon's 5G network for $25 a month every month. That's unlimited data, text, talk, and hotspot for $25 a month. All taxes and fees included. No surprises. Like some other guys. Learn more about Visible Wireless and Visible's data management practices at visible.com. Additional terms apply. It's football season and you can now get almost almost anything you need for game day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Can Uber Eats deliver foam fingers? SPEAKER_10: No. But chicken fingers? Yes. SPEAKER_01: Touchdown dances? No. SPEAKER_10: Buttermilk ranches? Yes. Field goals? No. Grilling coals? Yes. There you have it. Get almost almost anything for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on demand delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Get almost almost anything for game day delivered with Uber Eats.