Hey, all, longtime member but only occasional poster here...
We have an old house (1892) with a tall brick stack (about 35' tall) with sand-lime mortar, so the previous owner of the house installed a 7" rigid stainless steel flue liner (inside diameter: about 6.75") to put in a VC Intrepid II wood stove. I suspect they also installed the vermiculite concete/wet mix stuff to insulate the flue liner, but I'm not sure about that. (The stack is so tall that when I stand on the ridge of the roof, I'm not quite tall enough to see down the stack).
Anyway, went to start a fire a few days ago, and no draft! Normally, with this tall stack, the stove draws like an Atlas rocket engine, so I knew something wasn't right. Turns out that just inside the chimney, a piece of the vertical SS flue liner somehow fell down inside the 90° elbow which is inside the chimney and directly behind the Intrepid II, which is configured for "rear" exhaust, rather than "top exhaust." I guess the screws that fastened the vertical straight flue liner to the 90° elbow rusted out and disappeared. So now what you see when you look into the (horizontal) pipe that goes through the wall is the vertical piece of flue liner, which fell to the bottom of the chimney and completely blocks the flue. DOH!
I have no idea how to attack this monster. I was thinking of trying to lift the piece of flue liner up with a steel lever arm of some sort (like the steel lever arm on an engine lift) and then trying to TIG together some kind of "scaffolding" out of SS which would catch the edges of the flue liner and hold it up there in place, but I'm concerned that moving things around in there will cause the "cast in place" vermiculite (which is presumably now exposed where the two pieces of flue liner came apart) to start crumbling, falling down and in general gumming up the works.
We don't have the money for an entire new stack, and if there's vermiculite already in there, I'm not even sure we could get the old one out OR put a new one in there. Right now, the existing flue liner is 7" diameter, and I believe that with a height of 35' and the Intrepid II, we could get away with a 6" flue liner which I guess would have to be installed inside the old flue liner. Right now, that's the only thing I can think of to fix this mess.
Does anyone have any thoughts on other ways we might address this? We use this stove a lot, and don't want to abandon it.
Thanks in advance for any information.
We have an old house (1892) with a tall brick stack (about 35' tall) with sand-lime mortar, so the previous owner of the house installed a 7" rigid stainless steel flue liner (inside diameter: about 6.75") to put in a VC Intrepid II wood stove. I suspect they also installed the vermiculite concete/wet mix stuff to insulate the flue liner, but I'm not sure about that. (The stack is so tall that when I stand on the ridge of the roof, I'm not quite tall enough to see down the stack).
Anyway, went to start a fire a few days ago, and no draft! Normally, with this tall stack, the stove draws like an Atlas rocket engine, so I knew something wasn't right. Turns out that just inside the chimney, a piece of the vertical SS flue liner somehow fell down inside the 90° elbow which is inside the chimney and directly behind the Intrepid II, which is configured for "rear" exhaust, rather than "top exhaust." I guess the screws that fastened the vertical straight flue liner to the 90° elbow rusted out and disappeared. So now what you see when you look into the (horizontal) pipe that goes through the wall is the vertical piece of flue liner, which fell to the bottom of the chimney and completely blocks the flue. DOH!
I have no idea how to attack this monster. I was thinking of trying to lift the piece of flue liner up with a steel lever arm of some sort (like the steel lever arm on an engine lift) and then trying to TIG together some kind of "scaffolding" out of SS which would catch the edges of the flue liner and hold it up there in place, but I'm concerned that moving things around in there will cause the "cast in place" vermiculite (which is presumably now exposed where the two pieces of flue liner came apart) to start crumbling, falling down and in general gumming up the works.
We don't have the money for an entire new stack, and if there's vermiculite already in there, I'm not even sure we could get the old one out OR put a new one in there. Right now, the existing flue liner is 7" diameter, and I believe that with a height of 35' and the Intrepid II, we could get away with a 6" flue liner which I guess would have to be installed inside the old flue liner. Right now, that's the only thing I can think of to fix this mess.
Does anyone have any thoughts on other ways we might address this? We use this stove a lot, and don't want to abandon it.
Thanks in advance for any information.
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