Beware long post..... Stonewalled on Wood heat

lowroadacres said:

Now the fun begins.... Today I picked up the chimney liner and spent part of the evening reading the manual. If all goes well by the end of the week the liner will be in and hopefully we will be able to get our installer's/supervisor's attention before he leaves for Mexico on the 6th. We need him to order the double wall pipe once the liner is in place.

After the long fight it now seems that each of these final steps are going way too slow. It was extra frustrating to read the electrical meter on the weekend knowing that we are sooooo close to ending our full time reliance on that form of heat.

I am now trying to focus on getting the detailed work done and not get distracted by the extras like building a wood box, window shopping for a bigger and better stove, calling the engineer to give me a quote on strengthening a beam so we can move a telepost (because the room layout will change once the stove fires up of course).... etc, etc. etc.

We have more than 3 cords of very dry wood waiting patiently to release its warmth to our family and to begin to test out our theory as to how we laid out our house and the ductwork which we believe will circulate the air around the entire house.

By the way, for all of you Southerners, we awoke this morning to minus 29 celsius and a windchill making it feel like minus 38. Believe it or not this is better than it can be here.

I guess I will have to learn how to resize photos for posting or at least take lots of photos as we move forward with the install.

Click to expand...

Talk about champing at the bit. You must be SO frustrated and impatient! Hang in there, guy.

Good luck with it all. Hope things move along quickly for you. Did you ever talk to State Farm about insurance? I've dealt with them for over 25 years now and they have never refused coverage, nor have they priced it ridiculously. In fact they're one of the few who will cover some of my other "toys" (Bikes, heavily modded cars) and gave me zero grief with the stove in our current house.

I see you're in Manitoba - is there something about insurance there that makes it soooo hard to get coverage for your home?

What I find amazing is that the stove mfg would have given you their rating for UL and CSA installations for clearances to combustibles and the Ins. Co. should be honouring those. I presume you'll be adding non-combustible wall and floor protection etc...

personally, I would've been shopping around different Ins. Co's a long time ago.

We live in a cottage in the mntns at 8500 ft. We have a half dozen golden retrievers, wood heat, off-grid power, woods nearby, volunteer fire dep't two miles away, no fireplug within miles. All those factors are a problem. Now and then, some insurer will contact us and ask us to consider them for homeowner's insurance. I've become very fast and good at giving them a version of the above rundown and they are fast and good at getting back off the phone pronto. The last one, thru Geico, had no problem with anything except the fact we did not have "central heating." They said, didn't matter what source of heat but that it had to be.....central heating. Asinine.

These places used to say, well, you have a wood roof [cedar]. We switched to steel panels [not because of insurance, we just wanted it]. No change to the insurers. We have insulated stovepipe, numerous extinquishers, steel plates protecting the walls behind the two stoves, good clearances, easy-going dogs and no neighbors for over two miles anyway, and so on. An agent showed up here once a couple yr ago, unannounced, said he wanted to inspect our home inside and out. He told me his company required that he visit every one of his clients to examine the property insured, that they also told him that no one was to be advised in advance, they wanted this to be a surprise visit. [This was a place where we actually had coverage.] I showed him around. The dogs were well-behaved even if his black slacks were coated with a nice bit of dog hair. He didn't care about anything he saw. It was fine. Then, as he was leaving, he paused and said, "Oh, where is the nearest fireplug?" I laughed. He asked again. I said, well, since there are zero utilities up here, as you can see, and as we are completely self-contained, and since we have a flowing well plus several-thousand-gallon cistern, plus several hundred feet of hose and solar-powered pump, we are about as safe as one could be considering the fire dep't, volunteer, is two miles away. He asked me, again, where the nearest hydrant is, and I said, wild guess, maybe two miles.

Two weeks later we rec'd a big bill for more money or our policy would be immediately canceled since the nearest hydrant was too far away. It depends on your agent, I think, and on the company's policies. One place doesn't like wood stoves, one doesn't like off-grid, one doesn't like volunteer fire dept's, one doesn't like dogs. So on. Ours likes fire hydrants. There is no municipal water supply within miles uphere. [Maybe I could find an old recycled fire hydrant and stick it in the ground down by our gate.....]

Any smoke coming out of the chimney yet?

Every state has an Insurance Commission, usually as part of the State Attorney General's Office. They can be very helpful. Insurance companies want profit above all, but the Insurance Commission knows the laws, as they apply to benefit consumers.