Will this hearth do the trick - and I’m so glad I found this site

Hi folks,

New to the site, I have been reading and reading for several days. My wife and I are working on a little cabin in the mountains and will be making our first "use it" trip soon. It always gets freezing this time of year so we plan on installing a wood burning stove as project #1. Being new to the wood heat crowd I am very pleased to find and join this forum. I have been cooking out back with wood for 20+ years so I have a basic idea of air control, draft etc but in that case the worst you do is burn your dinner! That is all we want to be burning if anything.

We did purchase a vogelzang box stove (bx26e) to use for the place since we only visit a few weeks a year and expect it could come up missing one of these years.

I have read probably 100 articles on hearth and wall shield ideas and have come up with an idea based on cheap/free materials and would like a sanity check please.

New construction walls are not finished
Plan to insulate with the pink stuff behind the hearth area
Using cement board (hardiebacker) for the wall instead of wood. The rest of the cabin will be painted osb.
Will place corrugated roofing tin on 1" spacers over the cement board as a shield. Free so I am not sure of the guage.
For the floor protection I am planning the following:

directly on the plywood deck 1/2" cement board with a layer of corrugated roof tin (as air gap). Another 1/2" cement board with cement paver stones covering that. Sand would be used to fill in any gaps on top and the stove would set directly on this.

Due to the wall shield it is my hope that I can get away with 18" between the stove and the wall instead of 36". The hearth provides 18" of clearance all the way around the stove.

Other factors: This is a non-listed stove. It is being installed longwise against the wall with the door to the right instead of sticking straight out like one would imagine. This is to conserve floor space. Any opinion or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I am also intersted in affordable log splitting ideas. Thanks y'all!

jonwright said:

I'd review this if you haven't already:

https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/83622/

And not to be a complete smarty pants, but for cheap log splitting ideas...ah...how about an axe/spliter?

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Thanks for the link, I found the same sort of information on the hearth.com site and via google. It was an interesting read. Since I couldn't find an article that covered my exact combination of materials I thought I would ask here. I was espacially interested in the part about passing through a combustable wall. Haven't exactly finalized that plan yet.

As far as wood splitting - I asked a dumb question and you provided a very smart answer! I really meant to say, "affordable way to split wood without killing myself". I could swing a splitting ball a few times but that would eventually break this old man. The machines I find are typically way outside what I want to spend so I am trolling for some new top secret method if one exists.

Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it.

BeGreen said:

Welcome to the forum. I moved this to the classic stove section as this is a non-EPA stove. Your plan sounds like it will work so far as long as the wall shielding extends at least 8" beyond the stove length and width. Equally important will be the flue connection and chimney. Don't compromise safety here. And be careful with that stove. It has a reputation of being sort of an on or off stove with a crude air control. When burning look for poorly sealed seams and fill any voids with Rutland furnace cement after it cools down.

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Thanks for the warm welcome BeGReen. I burned this stove in my driveway 4 or 5 times with a temp stack to break it in and discovered the almost complete lack of air control. I got a winner here! The shielding will be as wide as the hearth (6') so it sounds like I'm good. My biggest concern was the floor protection. The best that I could figure from the materials list on this site 1.5" cement pavers have a R value of .14. This plus 1" of hardie backers .52 gives .67. I think I read somewhere a minimum of .84 for unlisted stoves. I added the corrugated steel between the 2 pieces of cement board hoping the air gap would make that up. I guess it basically acts like a flat piece of metal with tons of risers since the shape put a continuos line of contact first on the upper cement board, then on the lower, back to the upper etc. This is the part I'm not 100% certain about. Without the formulas or math my minds-eye says it is good.

I clamped wood against cement board and placed a torch directly on the cement board as a experiement and let it burn for 3 hours in that fashion. The dry cedar plank did not catch on fire. That impressed me about cement board. It did char the wood plank.

Thanks again for the reply, I'll try and share some pictures with folks once it is done. Next week or so.

BeGreen said:

Keep your eye out for a good, moderately sized classic stove in nice condition. That will give you longer burns and better sleep at night.

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Without even installing my cheap (I mean very affordable up front cost) stove I am certain that this is some of the best advice to be given to anyone looking to buy their first wood stove. I guess I need to learn some lessons the hard way. The good news is that for the past 7 years we tent camped on our land so I expect this will be some of the best sleep we have ever had on the moutain. The cabin is far from finished but it is dry and has a door. For many years the only structure was an outhouse that doubled as a storm shelter.

It does kinda make you feel silly spending $300-$400 installing a $170 stove. Info I didn't really have up front and honestly didn't expect. What could 20' of pipe possibly cost?

fossil said:

With the sheet metal, so long as it's 24 gauge or better, mounted with a 1" airspace behind and adequately ventilated around the perimeter, and properly sized, you don't neeed to put cement board up on the wall behind it. Makes no difference. The distance from the stove to the combustible wall can be no less than 12" (measured as though the sheet metal wasn't there). Putting cement board up instead of OSB or drywall makes no difference whatever. Rick

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Hi fossil,

I am certain you are correct. Since the walls still have the studs exposed I figured what the heck. Maybe it will help my wife sleep better. I am honestly not sure if the metal is 24 or 26 guage. It is one or the other for sure. I'm also one of those people that enjoys the journey, why buy a wheel when I can reinvent it!

for passing through the wall I'm thinking about double wall 6" pipe (8" diameter) inserted in to double wall 8" pipe (10" diameter) with fiberglass stuffed inside of the outer inner ring going through a 16" hole with cement board to trim it down to 10". Doesn't sound "specky" but I think it will work.

That's

6" double wall inserted in to 8"double wall.
The outer wall stuffed with fiberglass.
a 16 inch hole in the wood.
Cement board cut to cover the 16" hole with a 10" hole in it that allows the 10" diameter double wall 8" pipe to fit through.

I'm not sure how else to put that in words but I'm pretty sure you'll get it. I actually had to chuckle! That leads outside and up above the roof with a cap. This will play the role of a "thimble".