Yet again I am sucking more info out of CBN than I am giving back.
Since I discovered we have real wood floors in our family room See hardwood floors: Plan B , Our wood stove installation schedule has been bumped up.
Currently we have a gas insert fireplace installed in the corner of our family room Bottom left corner in this floor plan. We'd like to replace it with a wood stove (first choice) or a real fireplace (if the wood stove is going to take up too much floor space).
We don't have a chimmney in the house, so my plan is to go out the wall & up the side of the house with an insulated chimney. I know that heating wise it would be better to have the stove closer to the middle of the house. Can I do a horizontal run of chimney thru my gargage & then out & up the side of the house?
Being a Mechanical Engineer, I can do the heat calcs to size the stove. Being lazy I'd rather look at some rules of thumb on the internet. Any good web sites?
I'm going to visit a couple of stove dealers on friday. Any questions I should be asking?
Any good picture books of hearths? Need some Ideas to decide what we want.
How much of this is a DIY project. What is best left to the pros? Sometimes I can be too optomistic about my abilities [img]/forums/images/icons/blush.gif[/img]
""We don't have a chimmney in the house, so my plan is to go out the wall & up the side of the house with an insulated chimney. I know that heating wise it would be better to have the stove closer to the middle of the house. Can I do a horizontal run of chimney thru my gargage & then out & up the side of the house? ""
Best to avoid all horizontal runs of the chimney, except close to the stove. And best to avoid going outside with the chimney. The smoke cools off too much and will condense out creosote which can quickly plug the chimney. However, you will get that kind of information from the stove store that you talk to. I would suggest getting a quote from them for their stove and a quote from them for the installation.
I put in a stove in a new room last fall. cost of about $1900, with the installation another $1900. Thought about doing the installation myself (installed two other wood stoves myself with both positive and
negative experiences). Took the stove installer four trips back to finally fix the leak at the roof line, but think it is finally fixed. Almost wish I had installed this one myself too, but didn't want to at the time, and didn't the time.
My first installation was a stove with a horizontal run to get out through a wall and into a garage, then
up through the garage roof. It filled with creosote very quickly and was a real mess. The second install
was into a lower level rec room chimney (back of a fireplace) and was very successful. I've been burning
wood in this one for over 25 years.
Good luck. Wood stoves, installations, and the wood you burn are all three (could add the person doing
the burning as the fourth) important parts of the equation to successful burning of wood.
Thanks for the info. I've done a little web surfing (vermont castings has instruction manuals online) and I think this is something I will leave to the pro's.
<font color="blue"> And best to avoid going outside with the chimney. The smoke cools off too much and will condense out creosote which can quickly plug the chimney. </font color>
I could run the chimney thru a bedroom upstairs. Will the insulated metal chimmney be safe? IE can you touch it w/o burning yourself. The bedroom will eventuallly be occupied by little Hazmats [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I'll have to see if the wife is willing to give up the space.
I've been reading up on catalytic vs. non-catalytic stoves. Sounds like if the stove is your primary source of heat that the catalytic is the way to go. I've got lots of trees on the property and thus lots of firewood. I'm starting to think about the stove as more of a heating tool than "eye candy".
I've seen grates thru the second floors on old homes to let the heat from the wood stove below pass thru. Are these things still legal? Or are they a fire hazard? I've got about 800 sq feet on the first floor & 1200 on the second floor of living space. Also we have a walk up attic that may be finished in the future (about 600 more sq feet)
We have a pair of woodstoves: one a Jotul catalytic and the other a Hearthstone non-catalytic. The Jotul exhausts up a few feet, then has a horizontal stretch thru the outside wall, then vertical again to a point several feet above the peak of the roof. The outside portion uses MetalBestos and remains warm to the touch even when the box has a rip-roaring fire going. That MetalBestos pipe was enormously expensive, though, and the horizontal section forces us to burn hot (even with the catalyst) lest creosote collect. We put a quick access hatch outside at the base of the vertical rise to let us clean it out from ground level. After years of struggling with the chimney brush and all that crud falling on my arms, I found a better way to clean the flue. I load one of those little birdshot shells in my .22 and fire one round up the flue. Gotta pull the rifle back in a hurry though, or it and the scope get covered with powdered creosote! [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]
The Hearthstone is my favorite. Even without a catalyst it can be kept clean with a hot burn once a week. Thanks to directional flow of incoming air the glass front stays remarkably clean. It doesn't burn thru the night, but thanks to all that soapstone on the outside it continues generating heat and the bed of coals easily gets fresh wood cranking again.
We installed a DuraVent "DuraPlus" system like sold at TSC when we built our house. I don't think that it would be very dificult to go up through existing space if you have walls that line up from floor to floor. The kits are relatively easy for the homeowner to install. Most opinions are that you should avoid elbows & horizontal runs in the chimney...
Here is the link which has pretty good installation descriptions: Dura Vent
Regarding your question on floor grates, I don't know if they're legal, but they will be a fire hazard as they'll act like a chimney if you ever have a fire.
I installed a Vermont Castings Defiant with the catalytic converter. Very happy with it. Gets a lot of heat from just a bit of dry wood.
The on-line manuals were very helpful, and give a lot of information about hearths, clearances, and chimney details. I don't think anyone can get burned from a chimney that is legal and going straight up through the room upstairs. There will be protective "boxes" where the floor, ceiling, and roof is passed through.
Sounds like you have the makings for a very comfortable and aesthetic setting, with the wood floors and the prospective wood stove.
Hazmat,
I live not to far from you in SE NH. We burn 5 to 6 cords a year in two woodstoves. We just replaced the downstairs one with a Sweetheart wood cookstove. So wood consumption may go down. Anyway we had an Ashley catalytic stove downstairs and an Osburne non-cat fireplace insert upstairs. The non-cat is airtight and uses pipes to channel the smoke to the top of the firebox where it burns again. This allows the stove to meet the EPA requirements. This stove is easier to light and burns prettier than the cat stove. On the cat stove you slide a lever to get the cat convert out of the way. Otherwise there is not enough draft. Once the fire is good and hot you slide the cat convert back into position. Also the flame is not nearly as pretty as the Osburne.
According to sites loke woodheat.org and hearth.com the cat stoves burn cleaner. But both cat and non-cat must meet EPA criteria. A cat converter will need to be replaced also. In my Ashlry stove this looked like a very dirty job. As you can tell I prefer the non-cat stove. Though the cat stove held a fire longer.
Once it gets cold both stoves stayed lit all winter so starting a fire becomes less of an issue. This will change with the cookstove as it does not hold a burn overnight.
I have a center chimney with 2 flues. I get them professionally cleaned each spring. The sweep says that both are pretty clean and there is no difference between the two.
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