Thank you all for the tremendous information on this thread. About ten years ago when building the house I had what looks like a fireplace built (see pix) but specifically for a cast iron stove. It has a granite hearth all the way back and a full clay liner on a chimney that rises about 32 ft above the stove. I had spec'ed it for 6x6 clay liner but the mason used 8x8 so it's oversized. Where I positioned the stove I needed to add a short (15") horizontal run straight back to get the stovepipe under the transition. You can see in the pic there is an iron transition that is screwed into the masonry. It gets really cold here (-20 today) and when the stove has not been in use for a few days the chimney gets really cold and the result is condensation and creosote dripping when I fire it up - especially if I run the stove in its "closed" mode. I had a VC Vigilant back in the 80s with a similar flue that was shoved up over a smoke shelf and I never had this problem. I know the clay is oversized and that's part of the problem but is the horizontal run causing this issue? Even if I moved the stove back and ran the pipe straight down into the stove all that black water would run into the stove - it might not leak on the hearth but it seems like too much for the stove. I have taken to running the stove it its open mode which uses wood faster so it's not ideal. Wood is very dry birch/oak/cherry we cut in the woods. Options I can think of are (1) a 6" SS liner ($$$), (2) moving the stove back under the flue, (3) going with 45 deg flue members to eliminate the horizontal run. I'm sure there are other ways to approach this problem - any help much appreciated!
