Dampers for the Dummy Fireplace Owner

open fireplace damper

The Antisocial Network staffers who wander the 'net looking for DotD output have different "trigger phrases" that suggest they've found a viable candidate. Several of them keep a weather eye out for any variation of "According to Webster's Dictionary," which suggests that the freelancer who wrote the content had to look up the topic. That's usually not a good thing... as it wasn't in the case of Alex Burke and her eHow.com post, "What Is a Fireplace Flue Damper?" (now residing at HomeSteady.com).¹

Unlike most DotDs, Burke didn't cite Webster's in her introduction: no, she waited until the middle of her post to "inform" her readers that,

"A damper is a mechanism that closes off or silences vibration or substances such as air, flame or water. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary describes a damper as having 'a dulling or deadening influence.' The purpose of a damper is to reduce, soften, muffle, mute or end a process, the movement of a process or a substance in a process, such as the vapors generated by a steam engine or the smoke and ash that burning wood creates in a fireplace. In a fireplace, a metal plate is used to create a damper."

Gotta love that mishmash: Alex could have left out all the stuff about "silences vibration," since that has nothing whatsoever to do with the question she attempted to answer (although omitting it might have left her short of the minimum word count). Note to Alex: that's a different kind of "damping," dummy.

Burke dumped out about 470 words to say what took Wikipedia twenty-seven words, although that was apparently written by someone who knows what a damper is. Alex managed to stick in the typical eHowian mishmash of factoids and babble, including safety information about keeping the chimney clean. Her main focus appears to have been this somewhat puzzling claim:

"When missing or inoperable in a fireplace, valuable warmth escapes from the firebox in the wrong direction and wood or combustible fireplace products may burn too quickly."

What Burke did not ever do in that long and convoluted article is simply mention that, when open, the damper allows smoke to escape up the chimney flue instead of filling the house. Instead, she pounded out precisely the sort of bewildering prose that tips off our researchers that they've found a Dumbass of the Day candidate.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/info_12189539_fireplace-flue-damper.html

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