Can You Do Anything to New Stove Pipe to Make It Last Longer

Yep - any time I used water to clean, it just accelerated the rust rate 20-fold. Not even baking soda and water worked. Left brown stains on my stainless steel pipe!

Which, BTW, I would HIGHLY recommend. Whatever your getting out of black pipe, multiply it by 9, and that's how long stainless will last you, provided you clean it properly.

Stainless WILL rot if neglected, just not as quickly or as badly as regular black pipe will.

Not that I'm recommending this to anyone, but I guess I have the exception to all this pipe care ? Or maybe it's the location ?

I'm heading into my tenth season with the same cheap hardware store snap-together single wall black painted pipe. The range uses an average of 3 tons a year. I don't take the pipe down in the off-season. I just close the MPD (which hardly seals it at all) for the summer and vacuum the inside of the range.

Nothing fancy done to the pipe either. I vac it out once a year at the beginning of the heating season. And, I've even forgot to do that a couple of years. Surprisingly, looking at the pictures I've taken of how much fly ash build up it gets, the years I skipped didn't have much more fly ash in the bottom of the horizontal section than when I cleaned it yearly.

It has lasted far longer than the same type pipe I used on my pot belly stove in my last house. But that stove was in a basement of a house on the south shore of Long Island.

Location may be the key to it's longivity ????

Paul

All Ive done besides brushing the pipe is after I brush it I start a wood fire and burn green wet wood after I get it going and let it smolder away, putting some soot onto the pipes. Ive had good luck so far, except for pipe that gets wet afterward where it hooks to my chimney. I disconnect it from the chimney too, except 2 pieces, and they are rotten now after 3 years.

Use pipe that is actually round, not that snap together stuff and its easier to replace. And 1 pipe that is adjustable, slides in for length, would save you time too when replacement time comes.

I think maybe it's ok to rinse the pipes as long as they get thoroughly dried out immediately. My routine has been to scrub them out then blast the garden hose thru them.. Then I let them bake in sun all day long. After that I store them in the attic. This will be my 4th season with the same pipes if they still seem sturdy.. I haven't got them out yet.

I grew up in a house with a wood stove, so yes I've paid my dues (as a teenager). You name it and we did it.....cut and split logs, scoured our wooded areas for recently fallen thick limbs, collected and cut up countless wooden pallets, etc.

Hauling 4+ tons of coal, bucket by bucket, would not be much less work than just bagging it. At least by bagging it I can do a couple dozen bags on a fair-weather weekend and then I'm good for several weeks.

I haven't priced the coal yet but I'd estimate it's about $70 per ton more to buy it pre-bagged. As for savings, a rough guess would be that burning coal saves me between $500 - $1000 per year. HOWEVER, with coal my uninsulated basement stays warm and dry in the winter so there is extra value added w/ coal. If I tried to heat the basement in the winter w/ electric to the same temp as with coal, I wouldn't be surprised if that'd increase my overall heating cost by 50%. So from that perspective, burning coal probably is at least $1000 per year less than if I got the equivalent comfort using electric.

If you take the pipe , wrap it in newspapers and put it in a closet, it will last forever. If you actually use it , it tends to last a much shorter time.
One thing that does help is to disconnect the pipe from the chimney after the last burn of the season. Most damage to the pipe takes place in the summer rather than winter. After a hot day , it will cool at night and cool air falls down the flue,moisture condenses in the pipe, combines with whatever is there, and corrodes the pipe from the inside. The same thing happens to stoves. We see them regularly that have become paper thin due to this process. It is almost always found around the water tank in stoves equipped with one.
Even covering the end of the pipe with aluminum foil will end the problem.

Looking for some guidance as I am a noob, why do some folks remove the stove pipe and store it? I understand the need for cleaning the pipe, particularly the horizontal runs, do I need to remove it and store it somewhere dry? We will have a stainless pipe installed with a Harman TLC-2000 if that factors into the questions. Thanks.

Stovehospital - the damage you describe from summer weather and the use of tinfoil is that limited to just the horizontal run or the entire pipe?

The problem is with fly ash. It contains sulfur compounds that react with moisture to form sulfuric acid. Metals are delicious for sulfuric acid.. It eats away at the pipe during the off season if the pipe isn't removed and cleaned. It loves to eat stoves too which is why it's so important to clean them out good after shut down.

While everything is hot and the stove is in use, corrosion is not a problem.