How to Build an Emergency Fireplace Indoors

When it comes to needing a fire hopefully, your indoor structure has a fireplace. However there are occasions such as power outages, severe storms and other catastrophes that will make normal life nonexistent. There may come a time when you need to emphasize and put a fireplace inside your dwelling. If your shelter does not have a fireplace, you will have to get inventive and make one. You can utilize old pots and pans, barbecue grills, sinks, dryers, and other metal objects as the containment for your fireplace. Before you can have an indoor fire, you must properly vent the fire so that you do not breathe in the smoke. This will involve a little bit of ingenuity such as cutting or hammering. At the simplest you can use any of the above-mentioned items to start your fire in and you will need a vent hole at the top with some kind of material going out of a window or hole that you have put into the wall.

​

To vent your fireplace you may use old ductwork or things such as aluminum paint cans with the bottoms punched out stuck together to help channel your smoke. Basically, build yourself a chimney. Once this is done make sure the area that you are going to place your fire in is safe. You may do this by placing your fire pit on stone floors. If you do not have a stone floor finding bricks or exposed concrete will work as well. Make sure that you do not put it near walls that are easily flammable as the area around any form of indoor fireplace will become warm. In an emergency situation kitchen sinks often make for a great indoor fireplaces as windows are usually right next to the sink and makes for easy ventilation. Picture what a wood burning stove looks like and get inventive with the materials you have on hand.

 

I'm an old man and we've owned a few homes over the decades. This most recent house had a run-down fireplace, so we had a chimney sweep and a mason put it right. What we added: I had the mason drill a hole to the outside air straight through the back of the chimney. Within the fireplace the outside air opening has an sliding adjustment plate for input air volume regulation. If you don't bring in outside air, a fireplace will suck the warm air out of your house. I also had the mason attach a 18" long arm (fireplace >3' wide) with a diagonal to add strength and a hook to hold cast iron pots. The arm swings forwards and backwards. These are available online and are exactly the same as our ancestors used to cook over an open fire. Gander Mountain and others sell cast iron pots of all sizes. What I am going to add: A rack with multiple heights so that I can put a cast iron skillet at different levels above the fire -- just like when you are out camping. Also going to buy convection tubing (with or without electric fan -- won't do you much good if power is out) to maximize the heat being sent into the house vs. up the chimney.

I'd rather have a stove, but oh-my-gosh! have they ever gotten expensive. In one house we owned, we had an ENORMOUS stove lined with firebrick. This monster had a secondary burning chamber above the primary burning chamber. This puppy had the ability to heat the entire house via convection, indeed it would melt your eyebrows if you got it going too hot. The stove was in the basement and we only cut two holes in the main floor of the house -- heating then cooling worked like a prairie dog village. This house was near mountainous national forest land. Our second house had a much smaller stove. In the latter two houses, we raised our kids. The power grid in this area was iffy. Sometimes we would be without power for days in mid-winter. Being without power for just a few hours was quite common. Once we were a week without power, this in the house with the smaller stove. We had zero problems heating the house and cooking. My wife made me buy an camping shower for inside the house due to these power outages.

With this current house, I'm going to experiment with having just a fireplace. I'm certain it will suffice for survival reasons. Everybody in this area has alternative heat, i.e. chimneys everywhere giving off smoke. Note that within an open fireplace, one can use a camping stove or even a small hiker's stove to heat up whatever will keep you alive.