Hearth in this sense is the heart of the family, the civilisation. I think most of us feel a primal connection when we sit around a fire and it’s often why we all end up in the kitchen at parties – a relic of the days when the hearth was in the kitchen! So back to our little fireplace. It was a revolution for us. It didn’t come easily though. After one fateful Gumtree purchase, we discovered the benefits of spending extra on premium wellseasoned firewood. Firewood purchasers beware! Only buy from reputable firewood merchants listed with the Firewood Association of Australia (www. firewood.asn.au). By doing this you know you’re buying properly seasoned wood from sustainable (koala free) sources and reducing smoke pollution by burning efficiently – your neighbours and the koalas will love you for it! Burning unseasoned wood and not maintaining your fireplace and flue can contribute to air pollution. The other benefit of not burning with gas was our health. Recent research conducted by the Climate Council has found that portable gas By architect Ben Wollen heaters and gas cooktops are attributable to about Some winters ago, my family and I were feeling 12% of the childhood asthma burden in Australia down. Towards 3pm, we’d all jump in the car and (and is comparable to living with a smoker in the drive down to the beach to catch the last rays of house!). When natural gas or LPG is burned, there sunshine before the sun fell behind the escarpment. are pollutants emitted including carbon monoxide, We’d often see other families out on peninsulas too, formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide. If you read the absorbing as much of the sun’s energy as possible operating instructions for most of these units, before heading back into the shadow of winter. you’ll find you’re supposed to leave a window open While we had a pretty efficient gas heater in our while its operating. Kind of defeats the purpose! house, it just wasn’t a pleasant heat. We would visit A glance at the research out there suggests that friend’s homes that had wood heaters and were heating a room with wood fuel is low in cost and ice-cold with envy. So, as you probably guessed, we has minimal CO2 emissions when compared with installed a fireplace, and never looked back. other space heaters. However, when the jump is The word hearth comes from the Protomade to central heating (i.e. entire house systems) Germanic – hertha, “burning place”– and can be we start to see other options out-perform wood traced to a Proto-Indo-European root – ker, “heat, and even gas. The push these days is to go electric. fire” (think of words like carbon and cremate). Reason being the advances that have been made in While all this sounds like gobbledy goop a Viking the renewables sector and especially solar. Ideally, might say, it evolved in a number of languages to be we harness the free energy from the sun and warm tightly connected to home and the family unit. At our house during the day or store that energy in a one time it became a measure of tax per household battery to heat it at night. This opens up a number – the more hearths you had, the more tax you paid! of options but two stand out in particular – efficient I had thought for sure that hearth and heart were reverse-cycle air conditioning and in-slab somehow linked in language but, alas, I found gas-boosted hydronic heating. Their are pros and otherwise – at least etymologically speaking. cons to each, but my personal preference is for I’m not the first architect to do this either. Back in-slab heating. The radiant heat from a slab is, in in 1851, Gottfried Semper wrote a book titled The my mind, a much nicer feeling. Four Elements of Architecture. The first of these was We love our fireplace now, and it has become the hearth. He wrote: “Around the hearth the first something of a winter ritual to collect sticks and groups formed: around the hearth the first groups prepare the fire before the sun sets behind the assembled; around it the first alliances formed; escarpment. On weekends we gather around the around it the first religious concepts were put into hearth to warm up from winter escapades. It truly the customs of a cult... Throughout all phases of becomes the heart of our home. 2515 society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which took order and shape. It is the first and most For more info on heating options, go to important element of architecture.” www.yourhome.gov.au/energy/heating-and-cooling
Home is where the heart(h) is
34 June