CHAPTER XIII

A BURNING QUESTION

“Let me see your back-yard and I can tell you what sort of a housekeeper you are,” said a sleuth to a friend. But we would add “and your method of garbage disposal.” So we beg your attention for the tale of the incinerator, the modern and comforting Inferno, built to bring heaven (paradoxical as it may sound) into your home.

The incinerator, to be sure, is one of the last comers to domestic economy. To most homekeepers it has not occurred as either a necessity or a convenience; and for that reason this chapter aims to introduce the householder to the garbage incinerators.

Once upon a time the incinerator was made to connect with the kitchen flue and fitted into the stove pipe. The hot air was thought to be sufficient to evaporate the moisture of the garbage after the housewife had evaporated and dried it out as much as possible. This had to be done because moisture in waste is the deterring factor in its combustion. Then after this stove-like incinerator had done its work, the dried garbage itself would act as fuel.

But ... there was one terrible flaw in this method and that was the fact that the odors and gases that were given off were not only unpleasant, but often dangerous and so for this reason this method has pretty well passed out of existence.

To do away with the odor and the gases released from the combustion of household waste, the developing incinerator has been created and flourishes deservedly among us.

The enthusiast cannot say about the incinerator, as he can say about substitutes for his favorite drinks and foods: “If you don’t have one, you will suffer torture and go down to your death in agonies of discontent.” No, he cannot. But he can say this, “Although you can and do prosper without the incinerator, and although consciously you do need one in most cases, yet when you once own and use one, you find that it brings up the sanitary condition of your dwelling at least 50%.”

In brief, it means doing without the garbage can which breeds odors, gases and vermin. It means doing without the garbage carts which are æsthetically, alone, a torture to say nothing of the menace they hold in common with their aide the garbage can.

FLY COSTS

The fly costs the United States of America, it is estimated, about 350 million dollars a year because of its contaminating influence on the health and the weal of the population. It is alone responsible for nearly 90% of the intestinal and typhoid fever cases. The answer to this must be: Every one must fight the fly; and the moral of that is: the incinerator is one way of getting rid of garbage and at the same time starving out the fly.

There is no room in the house in which cleanliness is so important as in the kitchen; therefore, the garbage can, in most instances, militates against its absolute cleanliness. To be sure, there is one good can on the market with an automatic lid which is raised with the foot so that stooping is unnecessary. One touch by the foot on the pedal opens the can, and as soon as the foot is taken off the pedal, the lid closes. It is seamless and finished in white enamel. But even this can is hardly a substitute for the incinerator. The average kitchen _isn’t_ the best lighted and sunniest room in the house, and what is often left in the garbage can (if not carefully lined with new paper every time it is emptied) is a real menace to health.

If you live in the country, the garbage can is usually in the yard and tours to it are demanded daily. If it is cold, it is a hardship, and if it is warm it is a hardship, too! The garbage freezes in the winter; it decays rapidly in the summer, and there is always the worry about its collection. If it is kept in the shed, it means other sources of storage and worry, so whether you are your own help or whether you have help, garbage disposal is a really truly problem.

Now to the device to obviate the immoral fly, extra steps, unclean kitchens, and worry, the thief of content.

THE INCINERATOR

The incinerator, besides being the burner of garbage, is a garbage container. It burns garbage without smoke, noxious gases and floating inorganic matter. If the stove could do this, the incinerator would not be necessary, as suggested above. But it can’t, especially if it be a gas or electric stove. Every incinerator, if it be any good at all, is so designed as not only to burn the waste but reburn the gases, etc., before the products of combustion reach the outer air.

Every manufacturer will tell you that his apparatus burns without smoke or odor. This you will do well to prove by observing one in operation, staying in the building in which it is being used and also whiffing the air a few doors away.

The writer knows of a bank which was severely tried by a daily recurring odor at lunch time. The authorities found out later that the incinerator of a neighboring bank was playing its owner false.

There is no use in describing the re-combustion or re-burning devices of the good incinerator, but it is necessary for the buyer to know whether the re-burning is accomplished so as to reduce the waste to clean ash without smoke, noxious odors, and the rest.

The two main classes of incinerators are, (1) those that are installed in the cellar and there burn the garbage, which is dropped in a chute through a hopper installed by the sink or elsewhere in the kitchen (somewhat the way mail is dropped into the mail box through its chute) and (2) the incinerators which look like oblongly high stoves placed in a recess in the wall or against the wall in the kitchen where the waste is stored and burned. The cellar incinerator is connected with the kitchen, etc., often through the flue and the waste is dropped into a little hopper.

Of course, the installed type should, if possible, be put in with the connivance of the architect before the house is built as it is simpler than tearing up afterward. This type, of course, takes up less actual kitchen space.

Some homes use a large incinerator in kitchens (stove type and small ones in pantry or laundry).

OBJECTS

The large installed incinerator should be able to burn up bits of paper, sweepings, old boxes, soiled rags, garbage, smelly waste and reduce them to sterile, odorless, clean ash. And if these things are not done without clogging up your flues with oily combustion residues, etc., you might as well burn your stuff in the kitchen stoves. The ash lift can be used for various things. The ordinary portable type is primarily for garbage but some get away with whatever is put in them.

CONSTRUCTION POINTS

In the construction of the portable incinerator, the one that is placed in the room and not below stairs, you must be sure it is so built that the heat from burning is not communicated to the room to heat it up. This means then that the maker must think of supplying the apparatus with sufficient insulation to retain the enormous heat generated inside which is somewhere around 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. Just as your ice box is insulated against the cold air getting out, and the warm air getting in, so must your incinerator be insulated.

Besides, the lining of the incinerator must be durable and made to withstand not only the heat but the tremendous attack on its walls of chemical substances released in combustion. Sometimes fire brick is used but usually clay or metal is used in the portable types.

Furthermore, the incinerator becomes a fire peril if the insulation and the lining is not 100% perfect.

Again the devices of air intakes and outlets, etc., etc., are questions for the engineer. All that we are concerned with, is whether the apparatus does its work.

ECONOMY

The cost of operation is practically nil. The fuel used is gas or coal. Gas is the best method, the writer thinks. It takes only about twenty to thirty cubic feet of gas per burning, as the gas is needed only to start the operation and the evaporated garbage burns itself thereafter. Or should! There is a type of portable incinerator which needs no fuel, just burns by ignition of dry waste which burns the wet as it dries out.

CAPACITY

The incinerators are made in various sizes, burn from one bushel of waste and upwards, depending on the whys and wherefores of its uses--whether it is the installed type, or the stove type, or for what home or institution it is designed.

The stove types are purchasable in sizes ranging from 15 inches (wide) 15 inches deep and 30 inches high, to respectively 31 × 34 × 64 inches, and they range in price from about $70. and upward. (It isn’t safe, of course, to give prices to-day on anything as they change continually.)

CASING

They are usually built of very heavy serviceable castings, brass and sheet steel, well lined and insulated. Everything is well hinged and the grates, which are removable, are made so as to be easily taken out when it is necessary to remove the ashes or substances not burnable except in smelters.

SUMMARY

So almost in conclusion the incinerator is sanitary, destroys refuse, destroys it by burning not only the garbage but the products of the garbage combustion at a minimum expense, and it should sterilize itself and the flue in the process.

And it does away forever with the back bending disposal of garbage into low cans for the openings into which the garbage is put are high and comforting.

However, with all this we must not forget that garbage, if it can be expeditiously taken off the premises at once and easily, is an immense help as fertilizer and food for pigs.

But it must have fine and careful care. The pits into which it is put must also have careful structure and care.

To the surburbanite the incinerator will be a boon--no more fussing about garbage disposal and about who is going to collect it.

And to apartment dwellers (and they are being put in apartments rapidly) no more elevator and dumbwaiter garbage and all the rest of the garbage nuisance.

And to the new home builder, a sense of the disposal not only of garbage but of a vexing sanitary problem.

Furthermore, because you have an incinerator, it doesn’t mean that you should burn up good left overs. Never burn up to-day what you can use on the morrow, and with this injunction we think you will enjoy looking into the subject of the disposal of waste.

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