Our High Performance fire progress…
Thermovent high performance open fires the most efficient product available at Camelot. One of Paul’s own designs, they provide a significantly more efficient heat output than most other fires and stoves. The primary aim of a thermovent is get ore heat from the fire and use more effectively heat the room with that heat.
One of the reasons for such effectiveness is the fabric of the fire! Simply put, the metal front, back and sides of the thermovent creates a hotter environment in the fire as all the metal heats up. Now here’s the clever bit: all this extra heat created from the hot metal in the fire is utilised by a series of baffles and flues hidden on the thermovent and underneath the beautiful canopy that sows the passage of the gases in the chimney down – this means the heat spends more time in the thermovent and allows the metal and the fire itself to get even hotter!
All this extra heat created by the fabric and design of the thermovent is only the first stage of its increased efficiency – now we had a fire that produces significantly MORE heat, we needed a way to push that heat OUT into the room more effectively to heat more of the room up quicker.
The Convection System
To address this, Paul created a convection system – a cavity all the way underneath and up the back of the thermovent allows air from the room to enter the thermovent system, all the while being heated up by the hot metal of the thermovent itself. This combined with four expertly placed exit chambers along the front of the thermovent and underneath the canopy allows the heated air to exit the thermovent separately to the smoke from the fire and be pushed back into the room. This efficiency was only increased in our Thermovent redesign: the introduction of heat exchangers in the thermovent increased the surface area of the metal by a huge 140%. This enables the fire to pass that heat onto the heat exchangers , which heat up the air flowing across them. This air is pushed out into room through the exit chambers. At its hottest, the air around fire itself within can reach 300 degrees! This is then dispersed safely through the room.
This high-performance system creates an increased heat output, whilst using a completely natural convection system that effectively circulates more hot air into the room. This system offers a much wider range than the typical stove – our Thermovent offers anywhere from 2kW to 14kW, whereas a stove tends to be limited to either 7-9Kw OR 5-10Kw. The efficiency of a thermovent is further increased by the introduction of a flue baffle. One of the downfalls of a normal open fire is that the chimney is always open to the elements, allowing heat from other sources like central heating to escape. The flue baffle combats this by shutting off the chimney – keeping other heat source in.
All this high-performance is finally wrapped around beautiful dog irons, grates and canopies to give a perfect traditional look alongside the benefit of performance.
The Twin Skin Canopy
In terms of high-performance open fires, a particular problem people face has become significant enough for us to create an entirely new product as a solution: The Twin Skin. When dealing with canopies alone as opposed to a thermovent, a large fireplace and small chimney system proves problematic. Contrary to popular belief/logic – the larger the fireplace doesn’t mean the larger the canopy. The size of the canopy is actually dictated by the size of the chimney system. Consequently, this can sometimes impact negatively on the aesthetic abilities of a canopy when put in a certain sized fireplace with a certain sized chimney.
Paul created the Twin Skin to combat a frequent problem : we were dealing with customers who (unknown to them) had a very large fireplace and a very small chimney system. This limited their ability to choose a canopy size that would look good in their fireplace – it would be too small to successfully work with their chimney. Paul’s Twin Skin design perfectly combats this aesthetic issue by separating performance from aesthetic/appearance.
The Twin Skin features an outer canopy and an inner canopy. The inner canopy is invisible to the room and provides the ‘performance’ part of the fire – this canopy can be matched with the flue system for maximum efficiency from the open fire. The inner canopy features all the traditional elements of a standard canopy – including flue baffle control to limit the loss of heat from other sources such as central heating escaping through the chimney. The outer layer canopy is purely for aesthetic – but provides the perfect canopy to the customer’s wishes/design that the room will be able to see. This canopy can be as large as the customer wishes, in any shape, design or material – creating the perfect open fire to suit the size of the fireplace and the room it is situated in.