High temperature caulk application
The trick to getting this
high temperature caulking to adhere to the stainless steel pipe is to
have a cup of water to dip your hands in.
Just a little moisture turns
it into more of a clay like material which can then be worked to
whatever shape you need.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
A couple of years ago I had to get a gas-fired stove replaced just before the X-mas holidays. That turned out not to be a good idea. It was freezing cold and the new stove didn't work very well with my chimney. I hope this works out better for you!
One tip though. My gas stove smelled very bad and smoked quite a bit the first time I lit it. I was told this is normal with a new stove. So you might want to consider doing a first firing of the new stove outside.
Did you ever get your stove to work with the chimney?
I'm hopeful that it will still be nice enough weather at the end of the week when we hook her up so that we can open up the windows and doors and air out the house if anything goes wrong. Thanks for the warning!
No. It turned out that the higher efficiency of the stove meant that the flue gasses weren't hot enough to cause enough draft in the two-storey brick chimney. I would have had to place an insulated metal tube in the chimney's channel for it to work properly. Since the inside of the channel is rough masonry with protruding bricks I reckoned that the chance of that tube fitting properly were small. And after a cold winter I was fed up with the problems this thing was causing me and the flue gases I was breathing!
So in the spring of this year I invested in a proper high-efficiency combined heater (water heated radiators are common here) and hot water appliance with forced ventilation and outside air supply. This was much more expensive because significant changes had to be made to all the water tubing both on and built into the walls. But in hindsight it is well worth it! For one thing, it doesn't have pilot lights like the old stove and water heater had. So it is only burning gas when it has to heat something. It also turns the pump for the central heating off when it's not heating the water.
Since it has a programmable thermostat, it makes sure that my place is nice and warm when I get up in the morning.
And it automatically turns the
heating off when it's time to go to bed. It has made my place much more
comfortable. And over the spring and summer I've used 30% less gas. We'll see how the winter goes.
I'm also contemplating switching to a supplier of carbon-neutral biogas.