Newbie With stove pad question

Sir Osis said:

We are looking at buying a Jotul F400 Castine. We would like to use some cast iron salvage as our pad (in the form of Antique stair treads from defunct mills). We were thinking would install it on a piece(s) of cement board (which is over our hardwood floor). The F400 owners manual says that as long as we get the bottom heat shield, then the R-value of the material the pad is made of shouldn't matter. Does this sound right? We are starting to worry that it might get too hot.

Thanks,
-Beau

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Oldman47 said:

Welcome to the forum.
You may have another issue depending how that floor is installed. Hardwood floors do expand and contract during the year and need to be able to move, even the ones that are nailed down. If you have a floating floor, which is the most common ones these days, it moves a lot and will bunch up if you stop that movement.

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Oldman47 said:

You can have whatever you want if you are OK with the floor getting nice ripples in the surface because it can't move. I am getting ready to install some nice flooring and it specifically tells me not to use it under anything permanent like kitchen cabinets for instance. Instead you place a transition molding piece to go from the hardwood floor to the cabinet. The transition piece has a cut out, a rabbet really, on the bottom so the flooring can move without being restrained by the cabinets. That way it doesn't buckle when it expands or crack when it contracts. I think we are all familiar with what happens when wood dries aren't we? As far as a piano, no problem. There is always the 4 walls around it that should have an expansion allowance and then the piano can be the place everything moves toward or away from.

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Oldman47 said:

Look at your wood pile. Doesn't the checking you see on the end of a log mean anything? It happens because the outer wood cannot contract without squeezing the core, which just will not happen. Something has to give and what gives in that case is the outer part of the round. We preliminarily judge how dry the wood is by how much it has checked (how much drying has cracked it). Wood in your floor is the same darned stuff and it either gets to move or it tells you it is not happy. I grew up in a 1930s era house with narrow plank maple floors. The darned thing looked like a roller coaster because the floor could not move. This may be the first time someone mentioned it for placing a platform over a wood floor but it is not going to be news to your local wood floor supplier.

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