Need Help with woodstove

[Jeanne9914]

I just purchased a wood stove from www.thermocontrolheating.com. This stove will heat our domestic hot water as well as our hot water baseboard heat. We currently have an oil boiler from the '60s. Needless to say it's on it's last leg. We want to take out the oil boiler and install the woodstove as our sole source of heat for the time being and in the spring install a gas furnace for our back up. The guy that we bought the stove from said that all we had to do was hook our woodstove up to the chimney formerly used for the oil burner. The woodstove has an 8" flue and the the terra cotta liner inside our brick chimney is 8" square. We are finding conflicting information about downsizing from an 8" flue into a smaller chimney. We will need to install a new liner and are hoping we can up in a 7" liner. Is that possible? and is it ok to downsize from 8" flue to 7" (or possibly 6") chimney. We would like to install the liner on our own and we are having the stove installed by someone else. Any info would be greatly appreciated!
JW

 

[PAfluedoctor]

What size is the connector to the flue? The connector crock is the horizontal piece of terra cotta that the pipe goes in. You probably only have a 6 inch connector on an 8 x 8 flue. Taking the stove down to 6 inch could cause problems with the draw of the stove.

As far as installing a liner goes, to install a 7 inch liner the terracotta tiles would have to be removed. The install would also require proper insulation depending on clearance to combustible materials. You should hire a professional to install the liner and you could probably hook up the stove yourself. Although reducing the exhaust size is not technically up to code, changing it by one size can be done if need be. I obviously don't know where you are but you should really find somene who knows what they are doing when it comes to fixing the chimney. There is more involved than most people realize.