New Homeowner and Looking to Install a Coal Stove

Hi Guys

Spent the last few hours reading everything I could. When I lived with my mother in our old farmhouse we had a coal stove and never had a problem, I recently bought a house (built in 1960) and purchased a used coal stove that I am looking to install in the living room. We have a fireplace that seems to be in good shape. A friend of the family is very knowledgable on wood stoves and has a coal stove at his cabin. I am just concerned that something will go wrong on the install. We are looking to put the stove in the fireplace since there is a lot of room and the stove is small. What should I be aware of, is this a common practice? Should I not install a stove in the fireplace opening? What kind of clearance should be above and at the sides of the stove in the fireplace opening? I look up the flue and it looks VERY narrow. Maybe I am just jumping to conclusions? The make of the stove is hard to figure out, the badge on the back states "Arrow Engineering Inc,Boyertown PA"

Welcome to the forum, glad to have you here.

Can you post some photos of the stove and the fireplace? It would help.

And...We love pictures.

I'll work on getting some uploaded tomorrow evening. Thanks for the quick reply!! Looking forward to the help

Will look for the photos.

I'll post more tomorrow, dial-up is a bummer

Phew

I wish you luck. my situation is a bit different. My stove sits in an alcove. The Fire Department mandated that the front of the stove must project one foot out of the alcove. I asked why and they didn't have a clue, "just following the rules". The real reason I replied though is because my old Kanyon brand wood burner did not have UL tags or clearance tags. The firemen said I would have to go to the default clearances which were freaking huge. If I recall properly it was 48" from the front and 36" to the sides. I have no idea what the back was. I hope you don't have the clearance issues that I did. It's probably a good thing that the Insurance company made me have the place inspected because it was definitely a bad installation, and was far out of code. I had just purchased the house so my immediate assumption was that it was built to code. It would certainly suck to burn your house down and have the ins. company tell you they aren't paying because your clearances were off.

moose36 wrote:I am just concerned that something will go wrong on the install. We are looking to put the stove in the fireplace since there is a lot of room and the stove is small. What should I be aware of, is this a common practice? Should I not install a stove in the fireplace opening? What kind of clearance should be above and at the sides of the stove in the fireplace opening?

I'm not sure I follow your question but if you are asking about clearances within a fireplace, they would be -0-. Any clearances relate to clearance to a combustible surface. Since the interior of your fireplace is not a combustible surface, you can squeeze a stove in as tight as you like. There are many threads on the correct way to run your exhaust stack up into the chimney also, it's not very complicated. You should check with your town & see if an I inspection/permit is required.

Stove top vent?
Or rear?
Looks like a fire brick retainer slipped down, the back.
If the stove fits in the fire box it is not that hard to install.
It is similar to an insert install.
Your stove has no blowers...
So the more stove you can keep out of the fire box the better.
Many old fireplaces had an extra thimble cut in above the fire box...
Into the main fireplace flue...
So folks could install a stove without messing up the firebox.

The only thing I noticed is along what cape coaler mentioned about no blowers. My concern would be getting the heat out of the fireplace and keeping it from going up the flue.

Vent is in the rear, I will try to get a couple more pics up tonight....there is a UL badge of some sort on the back of the stove. I will check on that tonight. I would be looking into a blower to add to the stove, the guy who sold it to me did not have one with it.

This is how my parents heated their house since before I was born. My father got a sheet of fireproof board 1/2" thick & fastened it to the brick around the fireplace opening, & just ran a pipe into it. Burned wood that way for decades.

As he got older, the cutting, splitting & hauling standing dead trees was getting to be too much, so he bought a Harman Mark I -- same one I used to have.

This time, it was installed to code ( inspections have become EXTREMELY strict compared to 30 years ago ) after the building inspector got my old man all fired up with pages of requirements....

He set it up the same way, only he had to continue the pipe (with stainless steel) behind the board & up the chimney, ending at the damper. He cemented the whole damper assembly closed around the 6" pipe. The inspector liked what he did & passed him ( 4th visit -- dad was NOT happy )

So ... he ended up spending almost $400 extra to get this guy to sign off on the work. Such is the world we live in today......

So depending on how strict your inspectors are, you could do any variation of this same method.