The currently disclosed subject matter refers to the field of heating systems, which include a heating device and safety screen for preventing access of the users from the ambient surrounding to the heating device.
Heating devices such as stoves, kilns, fireplaces and the like, that provide warmth to the ambient by using gas, electricity, wood burning, etc., most often constitute a part of the interior and thus have an esthetic value. There is a plurality of designs of heating devices in different styles such as modernistic, traditional, minimalistic, etc.
The interior space of the heating devices of the kind referred to above can be directly open to the ambient surrounding such as e.g. in a traditional brick fireplace with metal decorations, or it can be partially or fully separated from the ambient surrounding at one or more sides by one or more transparent walls, to allow the user's viewing of the interior of the heating device, without having an access thereto.
As part of the normal operation of a heating device having at least one transparent wall separating it from the ambient surrounding, such wall can be heated to a rather high temperature, in view of which safety screens are used to prevent direct contact of a user therewith.
Known safety screens can be in the form of free-standing articles that can be placed by the user at any desired distance from the heating device, or they can be assembled with the heating device, and thus form therewith an integral heating system.
Often, safety screens are designed to be transparent to allow the user's viewing of the interior of the heating device, whether directly or via a transparent wall of such device. Some of these transparent safety screens are made using a mesh stretched within a frame, and these include single or multi-panel mesh screens, such as for example those shown in the following links:
According to one aspect of the presently disclosed, there is provided a heating system comprising
In accordance with another aspect of the presently disclosed subject matter, there is provided a method of providing a heating device with a safety screen, the heating device having an interior and an exterior, via which the interior of the heating device can be seen, when the heating device is installed for its operation, the exterior having two lateral areas, at which it terminates, and at least two adjacent faces that are differently oriented and meet at a merger area, the method comprising:
In accordance with a further aspect of the presently disclosed subject matter, there is provided a heating system comprising:
In accordance with a still further aspect of the presently disclosed subject matter, there is provided a method of providing a heating device with a safety screen, the heating device having an interior and an exterior, via which the interior of the heating device can be seen, when the device is installed for its operation, the exterior having two lateral areas, at which it terminates, and at least one face, the method comprising:
In the present application and claims, the term ‘exterior’ with respect to a heating device such as an stove, fireplace or the like, generally means an envelope of a part of the device, which at least virtually separates the interior of the device from the ambient surrounding, allowing the interior to be seen therethrough, when the device is installed for its operation, and which, in the absence of a safety screen, would be directly exposed to the user after the installation of the device. In case the heating device has walls made of transparent material such glass, that separate the interior of the heating device from the ambient surrounding while allowing this interior to be viewed from said surrounding through such walls, the walls constitute faces of the envelope. The term “transparent” refers to a quality of an element, be it a wall of a heating device or a sheet of mesh material, which allows light to pass therethrough so that objects on one side of the element can be distinctly seen from the other side of the element.
In case the heating device has transparent walls, the mesh material used in the safety screen can also be transparent to allow viewing therethrough (and through the transparent walls) the interior of the heating device. In this case, said pole can also be made of a transparent solid material such as glass. The material of the pole can further be colorless so as to make the safety screen supporting arrangement practically invisible to the user. Furthermore, where the interior of the heating device has a specific color, the material of the mesh sheet can be of the same color.
The mesh sheet, when stretched and connected to the heating device, has an operative length, along which it is free of any members required for this connection. With the heating system as described above, such operative length can be not less than that of the total length of said faces of the heating device, thereby not limiting in any way the area thereof, via which the interior of the heating device can be viewed. Moreover, with the safety screen mounting system as described above, the mesh sheet can be stretched along its length and can be held in such stretched state without any frame members at the top and bottom edges of the sheet.
The adjacent faces of the exterior of the heating device can each be planar, i.e. lie in a plane, the two planes defining therebetween a corner constituting said merger area. Alternatively, the faces can be non-planar and constitute differently oriented adjacent portions of a curved exterior of the heating device, the orientation of each such portion being defined by a tangent thereto. In the former case, the number of poles can be equal to the number of corners in the exterior of the heating device, thereby allowing the mesh sheet to take a shape close to that of the exterior of the heating device. In the latter case, the number of poles can depend on the curvature of the exterior of the heating device and the extent, to which the safety screen's curvature is desired conform to the curvature of the exterior of the heating device.
In the present application and claims, the term “mesh” means a net-like structure having open spaces separated by thick partitions, with the diameter of a circle inscribing cross-sectional area of each partition not exceeding the diameter of a circle inscribed in each open space. The mesh can be made of metal, fibers or the like.
In order to better understand the subject matter that is disclosed herein and to exemplify how it may be carried out in practice, embodiments will now be described, by way of non-limiting example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:
As seen in
The housing 15 has a body with a top part 15a, bottom part 15b, back part 15c, and side part 15d, whose surfaces facing inwardly define the interior 13 of the stove 10.
Portions of the top, bottom and side parts of the body of the housing 15 surrounding the exterior 11 and disposed adjacent thereto at its both sides, constitute an imaginary housing frame 17 (shown by means of dotted lines on the top part 15a and side part 15d of the housing in
The transparent panels 16a and 16b can be made of glass or transparent thermo-resistant plastic and their adjacent edges 14a and 14b can be connected to each other by a suitable material such as silicone glue, which can also be transparent. Specifically, these edges can be pressed to each other while having silicone glue along the meeting line 14 therebetween. The silicone glue can also be transparent.
In
The safety screen 20 includes a single sheet 21 of a flexible mesh material, which has two opposite side edges 22 and 24 defining therebetween the sheet's length 1, and a top edge 28 and a bottom edge 29 defining therebetween the sheet's height h.
The mesh material can have a color similar or the same to that of the surfaces defining the interior of the stove 13. For example, where at least those surfaces of the interior that are seen to the viewer are black, the mesh material can also be black, thereby preventing the user from distinguishing it over the background of the interior of the stove.
The sheet 21 is mounted to the housing frame 17 by means of a safety screen mounting system, including safety screen lateral mounting arrangements 30a and 30b and a safety screen supporting arrangement 30c.
The safety screen lateral mounting arrangements 30a and 30b each comprise:
The safety screen supporting arrangement 30c comprises an elongated pole 31 having two ends 31′ and 31″ and configured to be fixedly held in place in a vertical position by pole holding top members 38a and 38b, and pole holding bottom members 39a and 39b, configured to be attached to the housing frame 17, e.g. by welding or by mechanical means such as e.g. bolts or screws, in the vicinity of its respective top and bottom corner frame portions 17′ and 17″.
It should be indicated that, as an alternative to the fixed attachment to the housing frame 17 of the safety screen holding members, 33a and 33b, and the pole holding members, 38a and 39a, these members can be formed with the housing frame 17 as a unitary body.
Once the safety screen holding members 33a and 33b and the pole holding top and bottom members, 38a and 39a, are all mounted to the housing frame 17 at its corresponding portions, and once the safety screen attachment members 32a and 32b are mounted to the sheet 21 while clamping its side edges 22 and 24 therebetween, forming thereby safety screen mounting assemblies 23 and 25, the assembly of the safety screen 20 with the stove 10 along its exterior 11 can be performed as follows:
The order of the above operations does not necessarily have to be as presented, and the operations can be performed in different combinations and include different activities as long as the following results are achieved: portions 20a and 20b of the sheet 21 disposed on two sides of the pole 31 are provided with different orientation corresponding to the different orientation of panels 16a and 16b, whereby the safety screen 20 is provided with a shape corresponding to that of the exterior 11 of the stove 10, and the sheet 21 is stretched and held in place by its mounting and supporting arrangements. In addition some of the operations can be performed by the manufacturer at his site while the others by the technician at the site of the user, for example one pair of the operations 2-3 or 2-5 or 3-6 or 5-6 can be performed at the manufacturer site.
The material, of which the safety sheet is made, should have such parameters that, when the sheet in its stretched state is held by the above arrangements, it can withstand a concentrated force of at least 50N if applied in the middle of the screen anywhere along its length. One way of verifying this can be by lying the heating system 1 on its back so the longest portion of the safety screen 20a takes horizontal orientation and disposing weight of 5 Kg in the middle of the long portion, which is its weak spot, and make sure the weight does not touches the panel 16a of the stove, the screen is allowed to be flexed to that extend. These parameters can be wire thickness in the range of 0.1 to 0.5 mm and mesh in the range of 8 to 35 per square inch, in particular a mesh in between 12 and 24 per square inch, also the material should have the ability to be stretched along the length L of the sheet. One example of such mesh material is Blackened stainless steel 12 mesh with a wire thickness of 0.3 mm.
The safety screen 20 can be disassembled from the stove 10 and reassembled back for maintenance, replacing if desired, and the like, without the necessity to disassemble the stove.
It should be indicated that, when the applicant designed the above described safety screen, they desired to minimize the dimension of the pole so as to prevent it from interfering with viewing the interior of the stove 10 through the safety screen 20. On the other hand, as clear from the above description, the pole 31 had to be configured so as to ensure that, when the pole's ends 31′ and 31″ are tightly held by the top and bottom pole holding members, it can withstand the force, which is applied to it when the sheet 21 is stretched (hereinafter: ‘the stretching force’). The applicant thus has surprisingly uncovered that both the above requirements can be met with the pole 31 as shown in
In addition, the applicant has uncovered that, in view of the different lengths of the panels 16a and 16b, the withstanding of the stretching force by the pole 31 having the above geometry, can be facilitated by orienting the pole so that it is not disposed symmetrically with respect to the panels. In particular, as shown in
However, in general, it is believed that the pole can be designed to have a geometry and orientation different from those described above as long as it will be configured to withstand the stretching force. For example, it can have an oval, circular or any other appropriate cross-sectional shape, and it can be made of stainless steel or a material different from that specified above.
In all the above examples, the safety screens are mounted so as to be spaced apart from the exterior of the stoves constituted by their transparent walls to a distance that should normally be not less than 20 mm. This distance depends on the screen parameters such as its length and flexibility, and is obtained by the selection of the width W of the pole 31, its orientation, and the extent to which safety screen holding members are spaced from the edges of the transparent panels in the direction away from the interior of the stoves 10, 10′ and 10″.
The stoves 10, 10′ and 10″ are described above without any description of their internal structure and functional units such as gas system, control unit and chimney, which are well known and which have no bearing on the subject matter to which the present application is directed.
In order to provide these or similar existing stoves with a safety screen as described above, first, the frame of their housing should be modified to allow space for the attachment of safety screen holding members to the lateral portions of the frame and, where there are more than one transparent wall (
This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/040,074 filed on 21 Aug. 2014, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein, in its entirety, by this reference.
Number | Date | Country | |
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62040074 | Aug 2014 | US |