268 
NATURE 
[Huly 22, 1886 
oven burners alone are lighted and turned full on. In 
most cooking operations the amount of gas required 
would be only two-thirds of these quantities; the supply 
of gas being easily regulated to this or any other amount. 
If all the top burners in addition be lighted and turned 
full on, the average run of gas is from 40 to 60 cubic feet 
per hour. Twenty feet an hour for six hours a day isa 
fair representation of the amount of cooking required ina 
middle class family of ten persons. At 3s. per 1,000 
cubic feet, this would entail an expenditure of 4°32d. per 
day, or 2s. 6d. per week, or 1/, 125. 93d. per quarter. To | 
raise a gallon of water in a copper boiler from 50° F. to 
170° F., requires on the average a consumption of about 
3 feet of gas, so that if very much hot water is required 
for culinary or domestic purposes the gas bill may be 
expected to show a corresponding increase. 
Cooking by gas will not be introduced all at once. Gas 
stoves are now very generally obtained to supplement the 
kitchen range, for which purpose they are excellently 
adapted ; and as their possibilities and advantages are 
more clearly appreciated they will no doubt come into 
more general use. We have indicated some of the chief 
points in their construction and management, and while 
we do not advise any one utterly to discard coal fires for 
cooking, we would recommend a trial of gas as being 
likely, where it can be obtained of good quality at 
moderate prices, and where the stoves will be treated 
with care and attention, to be found economical, cleanly, 
and useful. 
Water and Bath-heaters—In a house where gas is 
entirely used for heating and cooking, or where there is 
no high-pressure kitchen boiler connected with a hot 
water cistern by circulating pipes, capable of giving a 
supply of hot water on the upper floors, one of these 
appliances will be found very useful. There are numerous 
forms of this apparatus, and most of them are contrived in 
avery ingenious manner. The plan usually adopted is 
to receive the cold water at the top of the apparatus— 
which is of copper or copper tin-lined—where it is spread 
out in the form of spray or thin films to pass slowly down 
over surfaces of copper, receiving in its passage the 
necessary heat from gas burners below, to the bottom of 
the apparatus, where it flows out by a spout. The 
temperature of the issuing water will vary with the 
quantity of gas consumed and with the flow of the water, 
z.é. the amount passing through the apparatus in a given 
time. The object generally aimed at is to obtain a bath 
of 30 gallons of water at 1oo° F. in twenty minutes or 
thereabouts. For this purpose the water must be heated 
to about 105°, as when in the bath it gradually cools 
whilst this is filling. In the best forms of bath-heater, 
25 to 30 cubic feet of gas must be consumed—at ordinary 
pressures, 7/10 to 10/10—to raise 30 gallons of water from 
50° to 100° in I5 or 20 minutes. Here then we have an 
apparatus which at the cost of little more than Id. is 
capable of providing ample material for a good warm 
bath. We would unhesitatingly recommend these bath- 
heaters, were it not the custom of most of the makers— 
with one or two exceptions however—to send them out 
without any flues or chimneys, and even sometimes to 
assert that no flue is necessary, as there is no smoke, and 
nothing unpleasant is produced by the combustion of the 
gas. There have however been some very unpleasant 
consequences from taking a bath in a small highly heated 
room, the air of which was loaded with carbonic acid— 
fainting and even partial asphyxia having been recorded 
under these circumstances. That the danger is no 
imaginary one will be seen when we consider that if in a 
room containing 500 cubic feet of space—the size of very 
many bath rooms—So cubic feet of carbonic acid are pro- 
duced by burning 25 cubic feet of coal-gas, the percentage 
of carbonic acid in the air is raised from ‘04 to 10, and 
the entire oxygen of 200 cubic feet of air is destroyed. 
Fatal results have been known from the inhalation, even 
for a short period, of air containing 10 per cent. of 
carbonic acid. The temperature of the air of the room 
will also be very much raised, and will tend to help in the 
production of perhaps fatal syncope. We cannot then 
too strongly insist on the absolute necessity of providing 
a flue to carry off the products of combustion to the outer 
air of an apparatus which can produce such an enormous 
volume of carbonic acid in so short a space of time. The 
flue should be carried into a chimney with a good draught, 
as the escaping products are generally much cooled down 
by having parted with much of their heat to the water 
flowing through the apparatus. There are other varieties 
of water-heater constructed for various purposes, only one 
of which we are able to notice in the present article. 
This is a spiral water-heater for lavatories, the invention 
of Mr. Fletcher. In two minutes this little apparatus, at 
a cost of half a foot of gas, can raise nearly two quarts of 
water to 100° F. It is an ingenious contrivance, and free 
from the objections attending most of the larger apparatus 
described above. 
Gas Fires—Yhese may be classified as radiation 
stoves, the room being heated entirely by radiation ; and 
ventilation stoves, warm air issuing from the stove and 
displacing the colder air of the room. But many of these 
latter also warm the room by radiation from the incandes- 
cent asbestos or from the warm sides of the stove. 
Mr. Fletcher has calculated that with gas at 3s. per 
1000 cubic feet, his open incandescent radiation gas fires 
cost for the same work about as much as coal fires when 
the coal is 30s. per ton, but with ventilating stoves the 
cost is about two-thirds of this. As in cooking by gas 
however, there are no dust, dirt, or cinders, and the fire 
can be immediately lighted or extinguished and requires 
no attention when alight. Nearly all the patterns of 
radiation stove now made depend on the heating of 
fibre or lump asbestos by non-luminous flames from 
atmospheric burners. The average consumption of gas 
required to maintain a room containing 5000 or 6000 
cubic feet of space at a suitable temperature in winter, 
varies between 12 to 20 cubic feet per hour, depending on 
a large variety of circumstances. Most people when 
sitting in a room prefer to be warmed by radiant heat, as 
from an ordinary open coal fire, and to leave the ventila- 
tion of the room to accidental circumstances—which 
usually means a cold draught along the floor towards the 
fire. Ventilation stoves, if they fulfil the proper condi- 
tions, are certainly better adapted for warming large 
apartments, such as shops, workrooms, and halls, than 
radiation stoves. The conditions to be fulfilled are that 
the airbe taken from a pure source in the outer atmosphere, 
that it be warmed by its passage through the stove, but 
not overheated or burnt—as is so often the case—and 
that it enter the room in an ascending direction towards 
the ceiling. In many cases it may be necessary that the 
air, rendered dry by its passage through the stove, should 
be moistened by passing over a tray of water before 
entering the general air of the room. Radiation stoves 
are perhaps better suited for private houses, especially for 
bed rooms and other apartments where a fire is only 
occasionally required. ‘The flues of these stoves should 
open into the chimney at the back of the fireplace. The 
temperature of the air and products of combustion escap- 
ing through the flue will generally be found very high, but 
the heat thus lost is necessary to create a draught up the 
chimney, and assists in the ventilation of the room. 
It has been said that the more general adoption of gas 
for heating and cooking would solve the smoke difficulty 
in London and those large towns where domestic and not 
factory smoke is the chief offender. A London pea-soup 
fog is certainly due to the coating of the particles of 
moisture suspended in the mist with “a carbonaceous 
sulphurous cuticle” as Mr. Harold Dixon has expressed it, 
and by preventing the daily evolution of millions of small 
particles of unconsumed carbon from our chimneys, we 
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