Hello all!
We moved into a 1950's house this summer that has a massive brick hearth and metal fireplace box (has air chambers through brick from kitchen into living room etc) which is basically unusable because of rusting. I have been planning on putting in a smaller insert (drolet/ashley/flame), chimney liner, cap etc myself to save money.
The chimney sweep came in the yesterday to clean the fireplace. He mentioned we shouldn't do any kind of fire without an insert because of bad rusting (confirmed what I thought) and the possibe escape of gases into the house. My wife mentioned that I was planning on putting in an insert and the chimney sweep who also does installs mentioned he would recommend cutting the metal fireplace box in the back to allow the flexible chimney liner to come down into the fire chamber.
Well I had been eyeing the flue area and determined with a little bit of cutting on the front lip that the back doesn't need to be cut and ripped out. The front lip is a thin metal strip on the front side of the box for the flue cover to rest against. With the lip, the flue opening is just barely 6 inches wide, but by taking out the front lip is expands to 8+ inches.
My dilemma is if having a bend in the liner, first towards the front of the chimney and then hopefully straight down to the insert would cause future problems. Where the pipe goes through flue there would be a bend which is the part i am worrying about. My measuring based on the diagrams in the insert manuals shows the liner can come straight down from the flue area onto the insert top if I extend the insert out to the maximum allowable into the living room.
I have included pics to hopefully show what I am thinking of doing and to see if you think that cutting and ripping out the back roof of the fireplace is really needed. Any thoughts or recommendations would be welcome!
Thanks,
Tim
We moved into a 1950's house this summer that has a massive brick hearth and metal fireplace box (has air chambers through brick from kitchen into living room etc) which is basically unusable because of rusting. I have been planning on putting in a smaller insert (drolet/ashley/flame), chimney liner, cap etc myself to save money.
The chimney sweep came in the yesterday to clean the fireplace. He mentioned we shouldn't do any kind of fire without an insert because of bad rusting (confirmed what I thought) and the possibe escape of gases into the house. My wife mentioned that I was planning on putting in an insert and the chimney sweep who also does installs mentioned he would recommend cutting the metal fireplace box in the back to allow the flexible chimney liner to come down into the fire chamber.
Well I had been eyeing the flue area and determined with a little bit of cutting on the front lip that the back doesn't need to be cut and ripped out. The front lip is a thin metal strip on the front side of the box for the flue cover to rest against. With the lip, the flue opening is just barely 6 inches wide, but by taking out the front lip is expands to 8+ inches.
My dilemma is if having a bend in the liner, first towards the front of the chimney and then hopefully straight down to the insert would cause future problems. Where the pipe goes through flue there would be a bend which is the part i am worrying about. My measuring based on the diagrams in the insert manuals shows the liner can come straight down from the flue area onto the insert top if I extend the insert out to the maximum allowable into the living room.
I have included pics to hopefully show what I am thinking of doing and to see if you think that cutting and ripping out the back roof of the fireplace is really needed. Any thoughts or recommendations would be welcome!
Thanks,
Tim
