Santaquin Hearths That Heat the House

A stove has consumable parts. A fireplace does not.

An open masonry fireplace has almost nothing in it to wear out. A wood stove or an insert is different: the firebrick lining cracks and crumbles, the baffle above the fire warps and eventually burns through, the door rope flattens until the door no longer seals, and the connector pipe between the appliance and the flue thins from the inside. All of that is normal for a stove that has heated a house for years, and all of it changes how the appliance burns long before it stops working. A stove with a failed baffle or a leaking door will not hold a fire overnight, will eat more wood, and will send more unburned material up the flue.

When we service one, we are looking at those parts as much as at the flue. Replacing a length of connector pipe or a set of firebricks is a small job. Discovering after a chimney fire that the pipe had been paper thin for two seasons is not.

Shops, garages and the second stove

Plenty of properties on the edges of town heat a detached shop or garage with a stove, and those installations get less attention than the one in the living room. They are also the ones most likely to have been put in by whoever owned the building. The things we find are consistent: too little clearance between single-wall pipe and a stud wall or a shelf, a pipe passing through a wall without a proper thimble, a flue that is too short for the roof it comes out of, and combustible storage stacked against a hot appliance. Clearance is not a formality. It is the entire reason those assemblies are safe.

What is in the woodpile decides most of it

Wood cut this fall and burned this winter is still carrying water, and that water has to boil off before anything else can happen. The fire runs cool, the flue runs cool, and deposit builds fast. Wood that has been split, stacked off the ground and covered through a full summer burns hotter and leaves far less behind. Never burn painted, stained or pressure-treated lumber, and be careful with scrap left over from a build when you do not know what was on it. We are licensed and insured, and part of the visit is telling you plainly what your fuel is doing to your chimney.