Fireless Fireplaces and the Bee that's re-building the Beehive

While they're installing the new environmentally friendly heat system at the Federal manor over at Howard hall Farm, our working environment has become decidedly unfriendly: It's FREEEEEZING there in the very pretty, open-air office on the balcony atop the windy hill. Reggie and I finally caved in and have been going between a toasty (indoor!) impromptu office we set up in our friend Peter's house and HHF (where they're currently digging through a series of awful "restoration" efforts made by previous owners of the house to get to the original fireplaces). Naturally, I was overwhelmed by warm-envy, because I adore the house at HHF, but couldn't handle the temperature.....so I was scrolling through the blog entries about fireplaces that were featured in Houseblogs.net, looking at stunning finished examples, like the white-hot Black Forest fireplace in DOORSIXTEEN's house, and House In Progress's pretty fireplace wish list...........(Their motto:"We call it Home IMPROVEMENT because it can't get any worse").

Needless to say, I'm drooling....metaphorically, at least. At the moment, the boys are uncovering the basement fireplace, and have made one very heartening discovery. Buried deep in the walls of the basement, lurking for all these years, there are remnants of an original Beehive Oven!More on this soon.

Reference: (From Wikipedia)

Beehive oven

A beehive oven was used to turn coal into coke.

Coke (fuel)

Coke is a solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal.

The volatile constituents of the coal including water, coal-gas, and coal-tar are driven off by baking in an airless oven at temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Celsius. This fuses together the fixed carbon and residual ash. Most coke in modern facilities is produced in "by-product" coke ovens, such as in the upper photograph, and the resultant coke is used as the main fuel in iron-making blast furnaces. Today, the hydrocarbons are considered to be by-products of modern coke-making facilities (though they are usually captured and used to produce valuable products). Non by-product coke ovens, such as in the lower photograph, burn hydrocarbon off-gases on site to provide the heat needed to drive the carbonization process.