First, the power outage that occurred sometime between the last time I hunted the Bolt Hole and yesterday meant I had to reset the clocks. Of course I set the time correctly but then set the alarm for 6 PM instead of AM. Therefore, it never woke me up this morning and I didn’t get out of bed until after 7 AM. Even then it was a nice crisp 20 degrees outside.
Being that it was 20 degrees, I stirred the coals in the living room stove and threw in a couple of logs. There was a little ca-chunk of falling creosote and then smoke started pouring out of every little cranny the stovepipe possessed and a few that were invented on the spot. Smoke flooded the living room and the upstairs bedroom. There wasn’t much I could do about the fire in the stove except let it burn. I did open the sliding glass door that leads from the bedroom out on to the deck and the bedroom window, put a fan on to direct the smoke out those openings and another at the base of the stairs to get the smoke from the living room up to the bedroom and then out of the cabin. At that point, the entire cabin became a chimney.
I was forced to do something about a situation I had been vetching about for quite some time. The previous owners are an artistic couple now out in Santa Fe but also hailing from Manhattan. Yhe owners before them were a pair of brothers from Long Island. In short, one was an artsy couple and the other pair were/are real city slickers. One or the other had installed the chimney pipe upside down AND tapped into the pipe as it passed through the upstairs bedroom with a T to join a small wood burning stove. The latter is a definite no-no compounded by the presence of two dampers—one above each stove—and the former, while a common error allows creosote to actually drain down the outside of the pipe where, if it catches fire as it is wont to do from time to time, it can do some real damage. A chimney fire is bad enough, but when it’s on the outside of the chimney—oh-boy! I’ve put up with this since we bought the place nearly 20 years ago but this time it had to be fixed.
Around noon the fire finally burned itself out with a little help from open air intakes and dampers. The outside temperature had risen due to the sun being present in a clear sky, NOT due to the fire nor global warming. I dismantled stove pipe so I could see what I had and if any of it could be reused. Much of the pipe had been jury-rigged to do the job and had done so with very little problem over the years but it couldn’t be reused. Creosote and rust had frozen it together pretty well and there were the two sections having holes for the damper controls and another having the T junction for the bedroom fire box. As I said, much of it was unusable. I had one four-foot section of Dura-Vent stove pipe from having worked on the kitchen wood stove two summers ago and that was about it.
I took some measurements and headed off to the store. I picked up another four-foot section, a two-foot section and a two-foot insulated piece to carry the pipe through the floor. (The previous chimney used a one-foot length of insulated pipe to do the same thing but also had two pieces of pipe from the living room stove to tat insulated pipe that measured 55 inches. Using a two-foot insulated would give me the extra inches in the living room and a few more in the bedroom.) The trip down and back took almost two hours, but that’s okay. I got to drive the new truck again and it rides like a dream.
Back at the cabin I started to assemble everything only to find that I too would have to jury rig a couple of items; the bracket that passes through the ceiling/floor and holds the insulated pipe, for instance. Previously it really did hold the insulated pipe—up in the air. The stove pipe chimney didn’t even connect to it except in the loosest meaning of the word. When I looked down from above, I cold see daylight looking back. This time, I made sure the entire pipe made a continuous column from the living room to the outdoors. To do so, however, I also had to manufacture a 3 ½ inch piece to connect the new pipe to the last insulated piece going through the roof. I’ve removed the bedroom fire box and both dampers so the chimney now runs from the living room stove through the bedroom and out through the roof.
It took me until 4:30 PM to get everything back together and clean up all the creosote dust and powder that I had released when taking the chimney apart. Actually, the amount in the chimney surprised me. Aside from a quarter to half inch of scale, there really wasn’t that much. Much of the blockage was caused by loose creosote getting caught on the T and on the dampers.
I’ve lit a fire in the living room stove and there’s no smoke coming out anywhere so things are looking good.
As to how to put the stove pipe together properly…. Get yourself two twenty ounce soda bottles. Cut the bottoms out of both bottles. These will be your sections of stove pipe. Now, how would you place these “pipe sections” in your chimney? Most people think that the wide end has to be down to catch the smoke and that is wrong. If the wide end is down creosote and other tars that condense on the inside of the top section's walls will run down those walls and on to…the outside of the bottom section. You want the creosote and tars to drip/run into the firebox where they will be burned. Turn your bottles upside down so the narrow end is pointed downward like a funnel. But, you say, won’t the smoke go out the wide end? Nope. The smoke will go up the middle of the column and not along the sides. That is it will unless you have a blockage in the flue or the temperature outside the stove pipe is higher than the temperature of the column of air inside. If the latter is the case, what the heck are you doing lighting a fire any way?
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