Quote:
Originally Posted by SailinAway
I called a stove shop in Meredith. The gentleman said the pipes don't need any cement around the joints or at the wall, because the smoke rises. He said, "You could shoot the pipe full of holes and the smoke would go up the chimney." You make a good point about cleaning.
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Does this shop do inspections? The more that I read, the more I get nervous you’re going to end up with a house fire. You definitely need to get someone who knows what he is doing and not try to use your woodstove until it is fixed.
Back in the late 1970s we bought a Victorian home in Old Town, Maine. it was built in the 1870s and it had no insulation and the curtains would actually move when it was windy outside. After going through the first winter and spending a fortune on oil, we decided we needed to put in a woodstove. We bought a nice Vermont Castings stove, had a nice brick hearth built to put it on and it was done perfectly. But no one thought about cleaning the chimney.
My husband is a huge New York Jets fan. The only way he could ever hear a Jets game was to go out in the car and sit in the driveway and listen to the static on the radio. He was in the car one day and a woman knocked on his window. He was really enjoying his game and rolled the window down to see what she wanted. She said she was sorry to interrupt him but that our chimney was on fire!
What happened next was like a scene from the Keystone Cops. The fire station was only one block away and we heard them coming up the street and drove right by. My husband was out chasing them. When they got to the house they realized they didn’t have any more flares because they used them on the last chimney fire and they forgot to re-order. The only thing they could do to keep the whole house from burning down was shoot water from the hose down the chimney but there was a possibility that the whole thing would crack. We had no choice. They put the fire out and the chimney was fine. We used that woodstove for all the years we were there. One year, we actually burned five cords of wood. But we learned the lesson,
Don’t mess with fire!