There are many so-called “odorless,” “smoke-consuming,” and “chimneyless” gas-heating appliances in use. These are always dangerous and a positive menace to health, and ought never be used.

The gas industry should grow and meet the increasing future demands of incidental house heating. This desirable growth, however, may be retarded by untruthful claims that flues for room and water heating devices are not needed. Much depression and lassitude of  spirit, lower vitality, and hence less resisting power to ever-present disease germs may be traced to gas fumes from flueless gas-heating stoves. These vitiated room air conditions must be prevented if there is to be an increasing use of manufactured gas for heating service.



In the kitchen the cook stove is seldom used for more than one hour at a time. The volume of steam from the cooking food will be much greater than the volume of the combustion products from the gas, and the steam alone will make ventilation necessary.

The person in the room will be constantly moving about, with head 4 to 5 feet above the floor level, and in all probability the kitchen door will be opened several times during the cooking, thus increasing the ventilation.
In contrast with this condition, when a heating stove is used in a bedroom or bathroom, the period of use is much longer, the ventilation is less, the person in the room will be quiet with head closer to the floor, and the doors will probably, at least in the bedroom, not be opened or closed. Furthermore, a flueless stove properly adjusted at 9 o'clock in the evening, when the person goes to bed, may become a carbon-monoxide generator several hours later, due to deflection of the flame or small change in pressure, when the person is asleep.

Hoods over open-top kitchen stoves, of course, are always desirable.



Manufactured gas, to be burned in large volume, must have some of the air mixed with the gas before the gas reaches the flame. This is the fundamental principle of the Bunsen or blue-flame type of burner. The air taken in to form the mixture is called the primary air, and will usually be only a small part of the total air required. The rest of the air necessary for complete combustion, called the secondary

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^[14] During the first 10 weeks of the winter in 1922 there were 81 asphyxiations from flueless gas stoves in Ohio, of which 34 were fatal. All of these accidents would have been prevented by the useof proper flues. On Dec. 8, 1922, the Ohio State Department of Health issued a radio broadcast warning on this subject.



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