The Paragrate Fire Grate

Thank you for checking out our YouTube/Paragrate ad, sorry for the quality but we are a small company and we need to watch our pennies. Maybe next year we'll be able to afford a professional ad. As to our surplus Paragrates, we had a mail order catalog that carried our Paragrates a few years ago but unfortunately for us (but fortunately for you), we built a few too many Paragrates for that retailer. We sold about half of the Paragrates from that order but we still have over 100 Paragrates available, so email us (Paragrate@att.net) if you would like to check if we still have Paragrates available for you to order (e.g. $99.95 + $25.00 S & H + $10.00 sales tax for Washington State residents). Also, let us know if you have any questions.

Remember to check the size of your fireplace to make sure your Paragrate will fit into your fireplace. Minimum fireplace dimensions 29" wide, 18" deep & 26" high (the 26" height allows 12" of clearance to load firewood over the main arch). Some people don't mind having a lower clearance, over the top of their Paragrate (e.g. 10" instead of 12") because their firewood is split smaller or they pass the wood around the side of the main arch. But we believe it's a good idea to have the top clearance as large as the width of your typical piece firewood.

Let me give you a little rundown on how a Paragrate works.

There are 3 major types of heat transfer, those being convective, conductive and radiant. And as it turns out, the main type of heat transfer for a straight fireplace (e.g. no woodstoves or heat vents) is radiant heat. As we mentioned in our YouTube ad this is the same type of heat that you get from the sun. As to the convective heat, this heat is in the form of hot gases or fluids (e.g. hot water) but the hot air that is generated from the fire, in your fireplace, needs to go up the chimney with the smoke. So you shouldn't get any convective heat from your fireplace, and you shouldn't want to, if your chimney is working right.

As to conductive heat, this form of heat relies on heat being transferred through a solid. So you get some conductive heat from your fireplace from the heat energy that is being transferred through the bricks. Although, unlike metals (e.g. steel, copper, etc.) bricks and masonries are extremely poor conductors, so very little heat gets to the living area from the heat being conducted through the bricks.

So the major form of heat delivery, from a conventional fireplace, is through radiant heat transfer, or light energy in the infrared spectrum. But even the delivery of this form of heat energy can be diminished if the firewood is not stacked properly. All of the conventional fire-grates essentially hold the firewood in a pile or stack, so you get some nice hot coals in the middle of that stack, but most of the burning surfaces are all being blocked by the wood at the front and back of that stack. So you heat up a lot of gases but again that goes up the chimney with the smoke.

The Paragrate is like the big backlog that the old timers use to put at the back of the fireplace. They would then put the smaller pieces of firewood in front of that big back log, so that the smaller front pieces would not block that big burning surface, and that big burning surface could then radiate more heat into the living area. The problem with the backlog method is, you can't always find a big backlog, plus, as it burns down, it's difficult to stack other wood on top of it. This is where the Paragrate really shines, so to speak. The Paragrate makes its own backlog surface by holding 3 or 4 pieces of firewood in a controlled stack with each piece on top of other; you therefore get a nice coal surface always exposed to the living area. Also, as those pieces of firewood burn down in size, they shift downward and always stay in contact with each other. So the Paragrate is self-feeding and so those pieces of firewood don't burn away from each other, as the pieces of firewood do in a flat grate, therefore, the fire in your Paragrate doesn't go out until all of the wood is burned. And if you need to increase the size of the burning surface area, like the old timers trying to enlarge those back logs; well all you need to do with a Paragrate is just add another piece of firewood to the stack.

I won't say anymore about the Paragrate but if you give our Paragrate a try, I really think you are going to love it. We have past customers that bought a Paragrate over 15 years ago and they manage to track us down to buy another one. Oh, if we do sell out of all of our Paragrates this year, we are planning on doing another production run for next season.

Thank you for your interest.

Steve

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Fireplace
• fire grate
• more heat output
• convective
• conductive
• radiant
• self feeding
• cool product