Having bought my tiny one burger BBQ I am wondering about the practicality of using it indoors.
I wouldn't use it unventilated, but it has occurred to me that I could put it on a metal tray on top of the hob directly under the extractor fan.
I know that some restaurants have indoor charcoal grills. I assume that they have very efficient extractor fans to remove any combustion products such as CO to the outside atmosphere.
Just speculating if a cooker hood would have enough "suck" to clear the BBQ fumes. It certainly seems to clear smoke and steam.
I may be wrong but I'd have thought there was a lot more risk of fumes with a barbecue because the fuel probably burns less efficiently than gas (the ratio of fuel to air is not precisely controlled) and there will be fumes from fat dropping onto the fuel.
My experience with cooker hoods (eg if something has burned and created smoke) is that they are not up to the job, by several order of magnitude. The previous people installed a huge motor-driven fan in the loft, connected to the cooker hood, so a *lot*bigger than the one in a dedicated hood, but it's not up to clearing the kitchen of smoke from burned toast or meat under the grill.
If a competent commercial organisation designs, tests, makes, tests, fits, tests, every day tests, then, just maybe.
Otherwise, never. Too many stores of things like a charcoal burning device, even when apparently no longer burning, actually producing copious amounts of carbon monoxide.
I was thinking more from the fire risk point of view, but as you say, CO production would also be a problem.
I wonder how many people suffered CO poisoning many centuries ago before houses had chimneys and the smoke from an inside fire just percolated through a thatched roof. I was reading a historical novel set in the 1100s and there was reference to someone having a luxury that was almost unknown - a chimney for his fire; I'm not sure whether it was entirely true that chimneys were rare as late as the 1100s. This was in a city of mainly professionals and shopkeepers, as opposed to little peasants' cottages.
David seems to be on a journey of mutual mass destruction, first of himself with his indoor BBQ and then all those 'outside' he wants to blow the *extra* toxic fumes over. ;-)
But hey, maybe he wants to reverse mans evolution, both in (outdoor) heating and how we make meat digestible. ;-)
OOI, how 'clean' is the process of making charcoal (for positive purposes, like filtration, not cooking animal flesh), I'm guessing it's 'not as bad' when done at a commercial level, versus the big pots you see hippies using in the forest?
most of the danger will be from carbon monoxide, much of this produced from the glowing bed of charcoal gets oxidized in the little blue flames above the coals but cooling excess air from the sides quenches the reaction so CO is driven off. In a closed unventilated room the char consumes much of the oxygen and as the CO2 in the room increases it gets reduced to CO and anyone sleeping in the room turns lobster pink.
Natural gas is premixed with air before it meets the air and so that bright blue cone ensures negligible CO is produced.
The burning fat is more implicated in long term increased risk from cancer from polycliclic aromatic compounds in the products of incomplete combustion.
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+1
pigs might...
Yes, I'm not sure of the mechanism but essentially once charcoal reaches about 200C there is enough energy to dissociate an oxygen molecule on the hot surface it then combines with the carbon. Then there is an equilibrium which means CO and CO2 are both produced depending on the conditions. If there is a high temperature and oxygen is limited CO is favoured, low temperature and high oxygen CO2 is favoured but a lot of heat is produced so there is a feedback working here.
My experience with cooker hoods isn't as bad as that. Our 3 speed hood can effectively clear the smoke from over enthusiastic cooking of, for example, steaks which ends up with blue smoke from the fat.
I would expect to light it outside, bring it into the kitchen (first bit of risk) then under the cooker hood going full chat. After cooking I would expect to take it back outside to let the embers burn out.
I expect it to be more poisonous than a gas ring mainly because a decent gas ring burns clean (most of the time) so only produces CO2 and water.
If the charcoal had fully ignited and was just glowing red and not giving off smoke then it might be safer.
The size of the space could also make a difference. One of the issues of bringing a BBQ into a tent is the small volume of air. As I understand it a lot of the fatal outcomes are where the BBQ has been brought in to warm the tent. Also when a BBQ has been left in or near the tent after cooking has finished (but when it is still giving off fumes).
I am just speculating at the moment. My plan was always to cook outside. Just looking at the extractor hood made me wonder.
There was a spate of deaths in Greece during the financial crisis when people in flats who couldn't afford heating or cooking (either electric, communal oil heat, or butane cylinders for cooking) were burning wood, which can commonly be scavenged from wooded areas for free. Without suitable ventilation the inevitable happened.
I suspect such houses were very leaky. You had in effect a natural chimney
- not a duct, but hot gases seeped through the thatch and fresh air was drawn in through gaps in the walls/doors/windows. Windows weren't glazed until 17th century.
And of course they wouldn't know what people died of - life expectancy wasn't high anyway. Excluding infant mortality, it seems to be about in the
I did some experiments with a CO detector that has a display reading parts per million. It was a FireAngel CO9D. Close to a gas hob with all burners on and no deliberate ventilation in the kitchen for about 20 minutes it eventually read about 10ppm. Sister-in-law had been suffering bad headaches for some time and was concerned that the woodburning stove in her kitchen was emitting CO, so she bought that model of CO detector. There was a lot of CO in the house at times, but not from the stove. It turned out that burning logs in an open fireplace was the cause. The highest concentration - something like 450ppm I think - was found in one of the bedrooms which had a fireplace whose flue was adjacent to that of the living-room fireplace in the same chimney stack. Loose mortar in the brickwork allowed CO from the wood fire in the living room to reach the bedroom. So burning charcoal or wood can generate copious amounts of CO and it can get into unexpected places. Fortunately the problem was fixed before anyone was killed or injured.
They normally say, not for use indoors. The problem is that the proper indoor ones are completely fail safe I believe, whereas the sort for outside seem to be pretty lethal at the best of times. Just my feeling on them. So many people seem to suffer burns or set their gardens alight that it does worry me when I smell that smell nearby.
We have a large kitchen/diner/living area which has the extractor fan mentioned above. It also has a wood burning stove with a source of external draught. It also has a CO detector which hasn't grumbled so far. Mind you, I wouldn't want it to grumble!
Risk is much lower than a small unventilated cooking area, just wondering how much risk there is.
A gas ring is pretty much an optimal clean burn fuel air mixture.
I'd be willing to bet one of those nasty BBQ trays allows some of the charcoal to be burning lean and making CO rather than CO2. Granted most of it will then burn with a pretty blue flame on the surface but enough will escape to pose a hazard. A CO monitor would be a very good idea.
We have one near our wood burning stove. It has only ever gone off when I provoked it with some smoking paper to test it.
I'd also be concerned about where indoors is sufficiently fireproof to operate one anyway nd why the OP would want to. BBQ outdoors fair enough but lighting one indoors is just asking for trouble.
Grilling or a griddle pan is far more controllable to use indoors.
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