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"You could coat the entire lining of a stove pipe with creosote and light it all up. If you have not first violated building codes how does that heat escape the stove pipe to burn the house?"
Sub...you are making the assumption that the flue has been upgraded to metal pipe. A chimney fire from creosote burns at 2000+ degrees, and when that happens the old pottery based chimney tiles crack from the extreme heat...allowing heat to escape. Remember, codes were far different in the days before asbestos lined or triple walled stove pipe....chimneys were separated from wood by a couple of bricks.
A certified wood stove installer will not install a stove in an old chimney that has not been relined...a self installed wood stove into an old chimney with no new lining is where the house fires will start.
My 1949 brick chimney is lined with the original, now broken tile from who knows how many chimney fires....it is now lined with SS flex pipe, and insulated for further safety.
^^^ Right...Flash point of creosote is ~75*C and it burns at 100*C...Flash point of wood is ~300*C...so, unless the wood is in intimate contact with the chimney pipe and not well ventilated to dissipate or insulated to contain heat, a chimney fire should not cause a house fire except as you've mentioned.
There was an episode of MythBusters where they address the mythology of magical creosote fires.
They setup a woodstove with a stove pipe, and mounted sprinkler heads inside the stove pipe to spray fuel oil in it. With a fire going and fuel oil spraying inside the stove pipe, they were not able to force the fire to magically transport itself outside of the stove pipe. It got seriously hot, but at no point did any magic happen. The fire stayed inside the stove and stove pipe.
A lot of people seem to believe in the magic of creosote fires, that the fire can magically transport itself to other locations.
my first experiences with Waterford Stanley wood cook stoves was in rural areas of SW England and then in Wales. We stayed in a number of B'n'B's that relied upon these stoves for modest heating needs and for cooking. Two of the hosts used the Stanley stoves for their self-serve breakfast areas where they had a kettle on the boil to heat water for tea on demand and the right side of the hob as a warming surface for the self-serve English breakfast items ... eggs, sausages, beans, kippers, etc.. It made for an incredibly inviting, cozy, and comfortable leisurely breakfast for us while our hosts were able to go about their morning farming or livestock chores.
I asked my hosts about their Stanley stoves ... they said that about 1/2 of the houses in the area used Waterford stoves and had done so for the better part of a century. Most installations were done with a single-wall metal flue pipe from the stove leading to an ancient stone/brick/mortar chimney ... and the adjacent roofs were thatched. Typically, those thatched roofs had a 30-50 yr lifespan. Those roofs were not considered a fire hazard from the wood stoves being used in the structures ... as best I understood, they simply didn't have a stray ember coming up the chimney and igniting a flammable roof problem. Nor chimney stack fires that were igniting any adjacent surfaces. As well, many of the fireplace areas in the older structures were framed in heavy timbers; ie, wood directly adjacent to the fireplace or wood stove and chimney that was the centuries-old primary heating/cooking source of the house. They'd obviously survived for a long time without a structure fire.
I don't know what might be different about their installations than the ones that this thread claims to be a fire safety issue with a flammable (ie, composition) roof, but it appears to be far less of a risk than this thread has asserted.
PS: I've helped install a number of restored antique USA-made wood/coal fired cookstoves. Prudent installations had them on a concrete or brick floor area and a nominal clearance to the adjacent wall surfaces. With a properly sized single-wall flue and a damper (leading to a 3-wall stack), these stoves do very well for clean-burning although they do not have "airtight" firebox control to minimize the draft into the firebox. In any event, with proper stoking and fire size, they can and will burn very cleanly ... although not as efficiently as the modern EPA stoves. For some of the installations, an after-market catalytic converter has been the way to slightly improve the heat output, along with in-the-stack heat exchangers. IMO, the wood stoves you see that are belching a smoky exhaust are from folks that don't have a proper installation and/or don't know how to fire their stoves properly ... typically, they turn the intake air down too soon to a minimal flow which promotes a cold, smoldering/smoky fire. Or, from poorly designed wood stoves with an inadequate flame/combustion path ... of which there were many in the marketplace from the late 1800's for well over a century. Many were little more than an enclosed firebox with no consideration given to a complete burning of the fuel inside the stove.
I know lots of people like to install 90 degree elbows and sometimes long horizontal piping for the exhaust ducting.
Seems like it would make more heat.
It might be but it seems more dangerous.
When we bought out first house all we had for heat was a stove for 5-6 years.
I was away a lot for work and my pregnant barefoot wife was a pro at fire making/keeping .
If you have a straight shot duct it is less apt to gunk up with creosote.
We used to clean our flu with just a super hot fire.
"A lot of people seem to believe in the magic of creosote fires, that the fire can magically transport itself to other locations."
It's not that the fire transports itself... it is the extreme heat generated that causes adjacent materials to combust. Example....put some wood on a bed of coals, with no flame present...when the temperature of the wood on the coals gets high enough, the wood will ignite. This is what could happen with cracked/broken chimney tiles.
Wood placed in an oven at 700°F. catches fire almost immediately (link)...if a chimney fire is raging at 2000+ degrees, and the tiles do not provide a proper barrier...that extreme heat escapes the chimney and will likely ignite adjacent wood within seconds.
That's why you want the chimney pipes to be as far as possible from easily flammable materials, and why it's best to use double or triple walled pipes.
That's why you want the chimney pipes to be as far as possible from easily flammable materials, and why it's best to use doubleor triple walled pipes.
My story....early in my life and just starting with wood burning for heat, I started with a tin sided, oval Ashley in the 70's...it worked good. One cold snowy night I stoked it up as usual right before bed. Off to bed I went, awoke with a start a hour or so later, and remembered I had not shut the damper down. I raced into the other room to find the stove and stove pipe glowing cherry red. Fearing the attic may be smoldering, I go outside, get a ladder and a pry bar and start tearing off the board and batten on the gable end of the house....the only access to the attic space (1905 log house). I gain access, see no glowing stove pipe, reach out to touch it and it is just barely warm. Thank goodness for double wall, asbestos lined stove pipe.
The last thing I do now is double check the damper is closed down before retiring for the night.
We use our wood stove as a backup source here in Idaho. When living in Michigan many years ago, we managed to use our fireplace as the ONLY heat source (when we were at home) during the winter.
Ha! I think this post 'jinxed' us. Our geothermal HVAC quit working yesterday morning. We attempted to reset it several times only to have the fan turning on momentarily few times.
My husband started the wood burning stove down stair to keep the house warm. We had never tried to heat the entire house (4,815 sq. ft) with just the wood stove before. The specification of our Hearthstone Heritage soapstone wood stove claims that it can heat up to 2,100 sq. ft.
We lucked out that the furnace broke on one of the warmest winter day so far (high 55F, low 30F). The wood stove kept the lower level at 67F. The living room down stair (where the wood stove located) is right next to an open wide staircase so the upper level reached 65F after few hours.
I put two big logs in the wood stove, closed the damper and all the doors to other rooms except the MBR when we went to bed at 11 pm. The room temperature was 64F. We never had to turn on the backup electric oil-filled radiator heater during the night. If anything, it was a bit warm with a blanket and a down comforter. I checked the bedside thermometer this morning and found it at 62.5F. We have our furnace set for 60F at night and the furnace usually kicked on briefly few times in early morning. So the wood stove definitely did a good job of keeping the house warm.
The furnace repairman did show up in the afternoon and found a bad furnace blower motor. He will try to get a replacement on Monday. We hope that the store is not close on Presidents day. We also hope that this is the only problem. The geothermal HVAC was definitely installed when the house was built in 1992. We could not find a manual anywhere even after contacting the manufacturer with the model number. We had the same heating company used by the previous owner to service the furnace after we bought the house. The did not install the system so the yearly maintenance work seems to involve only cleaning the filter and checking that everything is working. I don't think that there is anyway that they could predict the failure of a blower motor and/or other components.
The bottom line is that it is a necessity to have a backup heating source when living in a 4-seasons location. An efficient wood stove is probably the best option. If wood burning is not permitted, a propane stove would be the only alternate source.
I am glad that the house is very well insulated (8" thick wall with about 1.5 feet of ceiling insulation). It was money well spent to add on a wood stove after we found that the up stair propane fireplace was mainly for show! We did check with our wood stove installer on how to improve the efficiency of our propane fireplace. He said that it would not be difficult but it would not be much of a cost saving in comparison to adding a wood stove.
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