Possum Lodge: The lodge from The Red Green Show. A handyman (or woman's) paradise where if it ain't broke, you're not trying and duct tape fixes everything.
Skunk Works: A pseudonym for Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program. Originally a nickname based on the "Skonk Oil Factory" from Lil' Abner, the Skunk Works is the [unofficial] name of Lockheed's research and development arm. The Skunk Works has been responsible for numerous technical innovations, especially pertaining to aeronautics.
What's the Possum Lodge Skunk Works?
This community is dedicated to the best examples of DIY engineering. To the handyman (or handywoman) in all of us. Maybe you're proud of your creation or maybe you're serving up a cautionary tale. Whether mechanical, electrical, or architectural, if you've built something to make your life easier, or just because you could, no matter if it belongs in the Skunk Works hall of fame or in an episode of the Red Green Show, we want to see it.
Rules
Our house has a large double sided fireplace right in the middle of it. It has a vent above the doors on either side to circulate the hot air, which is not all that effective. I wondered if it would help to have air forced across the firebox and decided to try an experiment. I rigged up a window fan to blow air into the vent in one room.
It actually does help. It makes the living room, on the other side, nice and toasty.
I don't get why fireplaces don't have some sort of radiator fins to get more heat from the chimney into the room.
...used to be masonry fireplaces were a thing: once that thermal mass heated up, it would radiate for DAYS...
These days we just stay cold because electricity is too expensive.
Our parents were so fucking smart to decide hearths should be obsolete.
...builders cut construction costs; modernist fashion aside, buyers weren't crying out for cheap sheet-steel fireboxes...