Masonary Fireplace

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I'm having a problem with smoke coming into my house no matter what I do. The open fireplace is 36 /12 wide open 31 1/2 tall. I had it checked out towards the end of winter when I decided to start using it. Up till then it wasn't used for at least 2 years. The expert informed me it was good to go. Up till now I burned duralogs. Now that I cut down a forest and am ready to burn the smoke is terrible. No matter what I do, open the damper all the way to moving the log grate around in different areas the smoke stills rolls out the top. There seems to be a good draft going up. I see the smoke and sparks going up the flue, however, there always is some smoke escaping out the top into my house. If I was a stranger walking into my house I would have thought that it had caught on fire.
I'm at my witts end on this. The only thing I can think of is buying glass doors for it but until we purchase the house I would like to opt out of this option for now. If we purchase it I'm thinking of putting in an insert, but until that time I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks, Lonewuf

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Your fireplace has a fairly large face opening which means you need a really strong draft to keep smoke from crawling out at the top of the face.

Before you do anything else try one quick test. Open a window or door in the house and light the fire. Do you still get smoke inside the house?

If you don't it means that you are having "negative pressure" problems. Basically, the house is to air-tight for enough air to get in to feed the fireplace so cold air actually comes down the chimney. If the test actually "fixes" the problem then you need to find a way to get a fresh air feed to the fireplace opening from outside.

If it doesn't fix the problem the next thing I'd try is to get 2 4' long sections of single wall stove pipe and mount them on top of the chimney (try to make the connection as air tight as possible!). This again is only a temporary test so it doesn't have to be perfect.

If you light a fire with the extra 8 ft attached and it doesn't smoke then the solution is to either increase the chimney's height to create a stronger draft or reduce the size of the face opening.

If the chimney is all masonry it would be expensive to add to it's height. I'd opt to install a woodstove (I'm not a fan oif inserts) in the fireplace instead.

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Masonary Fireplace

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