Venting regulations?

  • Active since 1995, Hearth.com is THE place on the internet for free information and advice about wood stoves, pellet stoves and other energy saving equipment.

    We strive to provide opinions, articles, discussions and history related to Hearth Products and in a more general sense, energy issues.

    We promote the EFFICIENT, RESPONSIBLE, CLEAN and SAFE use of all fuels, whether renewable or fossil.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Lawnman323

New Member
Hearth Supporter
Dec 16, 2007
35
N. Mich.
First off, thank you to the people here who helped me with my ZC Lennox door questions in December. The fireplace came out great.

I have a house with a walk out basement and a family member has a new in box wood stove that I would like to put in the basement and try to heat most of the house. My question is this: how long of a run laterally can you make safely with a pipe? I will be consulting with the building dept. on Monday, but I'm doing planning today. From the stove, I need to go up, through the wall, bend 90deg. left, and make probably a 20' run laterally before I can pop straight up. I plan on rising 6-12" on this run, but also note that I will be under a deck the entire time on this lateral run. I would like not to go through the deck if possible because the deck area will be very visible and by running that 20' I will be on a corner of the house or possibly wrap around the corner and head up.

Any input? Thank you in advance.
 
If it's anything like the building department in my county they won't be much help.

I walked in to pull my permit and they didn't know what to do with me. The lady's at the desk had to go find another guy somewhere else in the building, and he just took his best guess. They had me cross out furnace and write in "wood stove" on the permit application. There wasn't even an option on the paperwork for a wood burning stove!

I asked them "Does this mean that not too many pull permits for these things?"

Their reply was "Yeah, most folks just put them in without a permit".

My final inspection tool all of about 5 minutes. One guy looked in my attic, the other took a look at my hearth pad and stove setup. Signed the paperwork and said "looks good." That's about all I got from them.

-SF
 
20 feet horizontally? Like that's going to draft...

You want as little horizontal as possible, normally just enough to pass from inside to outside then go straight up. Normally offsets are at 30 deg, or 45deg for connector pipe.
 
There are two age-old rules for horizontal runs in wood stove venting we've learned to follow:

All horizontal runs need a slight rise (at least 1/4" per foot)

For every foot of horizontal run, you'll need five feet of vertical run to compensate for the loss of draft.

I'm not sure where these rules originated, but I can tell you that the few times we deviated from them, we got bit.
 
Looking at the layout of the room, I could move the unit. My ZC Lennox has a steel chimney and vents perfectly. As I recall, the diameter was quite large in the attic (2'). Is it permissible to tie my new wood stove (vermont castings large 2479) into this chimney? I'd like to but am skeptical about downdrafts, etc.

Thank you again.
 
Looks like it is not a good idea from the VC manual. I will look at the stone chimney and see if I can run another pipe all the way up.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.