Yeah, plus liner and bottom plate and I'm getting closer to $1,500 than $500. I think I need to look more into putting an insert in. Any recs on where to start there? I see the FAQ about stoves, but not about inserts.
I'm not sure which FAQ you mean, but here's a bunch on chimneys.
(broken link removed)
Basically, an insert is a stove than you can shove back into the FP. Some folks do this with a freestanding stove, but most stoves are too tall to fit under most FP lintels. So, the main difference is that inserts are shorter.
...shorter and designed to work with a blower which circulates air inside an outer shell, because you need that to get the heat out of the FP. Otherwise, the heat tends to get soaked up by the FP masonry, and if it's a FP on an exterior wall with an external chimney, much of this heat finds it's way to the great outdoors. For these reasons, I'm not a fan of inserts, but they can be effective heaters, and you have to go with what will fit your space...unless you want to get into remodeling your hearth, which many here have done.
I went with a "hearth-mounted" stove, which sits just outside the FP, and vents out the back, into the FP and up the chimney. This is not an inexpensive option, because there aren't that many rear-venting stoves with a flue collar low enough for the pipe to pass below an average FP lintel.
Inexpensive stoves are mostly top-venting. The typical way to install in front of a FP would be to run stove pipe up a few feet, then punch back through the wall and into the masonry chimney, where you connect to a liner. Some hearth modification, but you don't have to hassle with getting your liner down through the damper frame, which usually involves cutting the damper frame or removing the whole thing.
If you don't want to do either of these installs, you're looking at an insert. Offhand, I'd start with the Pacific Energy inserts. Their Summit has quite a few fans here. I don't know what they call their smaller ones, I think they have a few now. PE aren't the chespest, but they're not the most expensive either, and folks seem to like them. I like the one-piece stainless baffle/secondary air system that PE uses instead of several air tubes.
Someone who follows inserts more closely will have more recommendations for you. You need to measure the interior dimensions of your FP to see what will fit, and tell us the size of the space you want to heat, to appropriately size the stove/insert. Even if you can fit only a small insert into your FP, still way better than an open FP.
Oh yeah, besides the $ you will save on Thermix and Chambertech, 6" pipe is a lot cheaper than the 10" or larger pipe you would need for the FP, so factor that into your stove/insert budget. Most of us figure that our wood heaters pay for themselves after some years of saving on heat bills.
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