wood burning stoves

FITTING A WOOD BURNING STOVE IN A CONSERVATORY OR OTHER ROOM WITHOUT A TRADITIONAL CHIMNEY STACK. by wood burning stoves

This is a question we seem to be getting asked more and more these days. The difficulty and expense of heating a conservatory or new extension to any property can be a big problem for people, but here is a beautiful and elegant solution. A wood burning stove.

To begin with, do you really want to extend your existing gas or electric central heating system into your new room, and have a plumber running new hot water pipes through your walls out there to another ugly radiator?

Or worse still, are you considering having an electrician gouging a channel along the wall to run an electrical cable out to run an expensive electric heater of some sort?

Many more people these days are eschewing these ideas and plumping for the warmth and beauty of a real fire in the form of a wood or multi fuel burning stove in their homes, so why not in a conservatory or new extension room?

Of course the immediate problem is how do you get rid of the smoke without a hearth and a chimney to stand your stove in? Well the answer is that it can be done using a special flue arrangement that goes straight out through the roof.

Firstly, you will want to decide on where your stove will be placed in your room, and this is an important decision as not only is it an aesthetic choice for you, it will affect where and how your flue will have to go through the roof.

Also at this point you should consider on what your stove willl be standing. If you have a lovely wood floor and stand a stove directly on it, you can rest assured that over time it will become discoloured and damaged by the heat it conducts from the stove legs. Most people would therefore put down a base of some sort. Tiles or stone would do the job and be an attractive feature, but pretty much anything with low heat conductivity and stable enough to support the weight of the stove will be fine.

Next you have to consider the size of the room and choose a stove with a Kw rating of the appropriate size so you don't over or under heat it. If you need help with this use our handy Kw calculator

You will then need the assistance of a good installer to help you set up the flue pipe arrangement.

A quick and relatively simple way is to use the conventional steel/stainless steel flue pipe for the first sections coming out of the top (or rear) of your stove. This flue pipe will be visible in the room, so it is important to choose flue pipe you like the look of - whether it will be shiny chrome or a matt grey to match the stove colour - as in the photo on the left.

This length of flue pipe will also have an added heating bonus as it will radiate more heat into the room as the flue heats up when the fire in the stove gets up to temperature.

As the flue reaches the ceiling height of your conservatory or extension room, you will need to change to twin wall insulated pipe, using an adaptor.

You can clearly see the join in the picture on the left where it changes colour.

In this example the twin wall flue pipe is starting lower down than ceiling height because this enables a false chimney breast to be formed from 3x2 timber and covered with plasterboard.

This allows you to make a nice decorative feature of the stove in a new extension to a property but is not always quite so suitable in a conservatory where you will probably need to go straight up to the ceiling with standard flue pipe and then switch to twin wall flue to finish the job.

You will also need to place a fire guard around any wooden joists in the roof void and continue out through the roof using the twin walled pipe use a flashing kit to seal the external roof and then finish with a suitable cowl as you can see in the picture on the left.

If this was a conservatory flue install, your installer would simply cut a hole in the conservatory roof, using a jig saw, run the twin wall flue out, and then seal using a flashing kit as described above. This method can be used on most single storey flat or pitch roof buildings.

What you can end up with is a beautiful wood burning stove that looks something like the picture on the left, with a single flue pipe coming from the top and a roaring fire to enjoy on those long winter nights ahead.

After all, you didn't add a conservatory or extension to your house to only use in the summer months did you?

The total cost on an installation like this can be considerably less than extending your central heating sysytem and the savings on fuel costs in the future make the prospect even more attractive.

For more help and advice on installing a similar system in your own home, why not give us a call?

wood burning stoves by stovemaestro