The Squirrel

The Squirrel

When we bought this house, 6 years ago, my wife said to me "You know honey, we can put a wood-stove in that corner."  Since then it's been in the back of our minds and this last Thanksgiving we finally decided to make it a reality.

After a great deal of research, performed mostly by my wife from the moment her eyes opened in the morning till the moment they drifted shut at night, we settled on a MorsØ 1410.  I won't go into the technical specs in detail here but it's a small Danish stove that puts out about 30,000 BTU (9KW).  The stove is designed to heat 800 -1000 sqft which matches the space on our main floor pretty well.  We expect that the living room, kitchen, and dining area will be comfy warm and some heat will drift back into the rest of the house.  We have a very functional (if old) oil-fired forced water radiator system (non-zoned) that heats our house well but we wanted a backup for power outages and an alternate to heating the entire house to get one room warm.

Because this project involved a potentially serious hazard to our home and family we went through the hoopla of pulling a permit for it.  I was apprehensive about the process but it actually turned out to be far less onerous than I had feared.

There were two main facets to our install...

Phase 1: Hearth and Heat Shield - This phase consisted of removing a closet and in-wall AC unit from the area where the stove would go, constructing a hearth pad for the stove to sit on and protecting the walls from the heat the stove would generate.

Phase 2: Chimney - This phase we subcontracted out to a local chimney guy who did a great job.  His estimate for materials and labor came in almost exactly at our cost for materials so that was kind of a no-brainer.

The first thing to go was the AC unit.  It looked EXACTLY like the one I had in my room when I was in high school which means it's yearly energy costs were only slightly less than that of a Tokyo department store.

I put a picture online and told all my friends that I was installing a through-wall fish tank.  They all laughed at my folly.

No stick framing here

It turns out that our 1951 post-war Cape is constructed to a standard not seen too often anymore.  We've always been impressed with the inherent R-value of our house and the cross section certainly helps explain that.

Once we had removed the AC unit it came time to remove the closet door, wall it up, and pretend that it never happened.  That was easier said than done as it turns out that every interior door frame in this house is steel.  Right down to the integral welded hinges that I had to cut off with an angle grinder.

With the AC unit gone and the closet a hanger filled memory we moved on to the framing for the hearth.  Not too complicated a task and I was happy to have it in the rearview.

In retrospect, I wish I had put down a "subfloor" between the durock and the framing.  I don't like the way it flexed on some of the larger gaps.  It's nothing big but when you're doing a tile install any flex can be a problem.  At any rate, we put down the durock and got ready to tile.

Wyfey had her heart set on a natural stone look so we ended up going with slate tiles.  I'd never worked with slate before and I would happily work with it again.  Each tile is different in hue and thickness, some drastically, and getting them all laid out in an aesthetically pleasing way while all being approximately the same height was a challenge.  The tiles themselves cut easily and they were so cheap that I have enough surplus to make myself a very nice slate house should this one fall down.

 We very pointedly ignored well meaning advice and trimmed the hearth in wood.  When in doubt for a building material we almost always go with nice wood.  The main room in our house has (original) oak flooring, birch kitchen countertops, tiger maple bar top, orange agate mantle, teak wall sconces, and now machiche hearth trim.  Machiche is a Very Hard Wood.  Ask my wife.  She's the one who spent an hour pre-drilling and then hammering in very small finish nails.  Apparently it's used for decking so we should be good for the foreseeable future.

After much discussion with the local building inspector we determined that we not only had to move the stove WAY the HELL to the right of the pad and we also had to tear out JD's lovely drywall work.  This turned out to be to our benefit though as it created a nice spot for a wood stack and

kindling area on one side of the hearth pad.

In order to maximize our available living room space we had to make sure that the stove was as close to the wall as possible.  The main concern was distance from the edge of the stove to "combustibles".  According to Wyfey's research the best way to shrink that distance was to install a heat shield positioned 1" away from the wall.  This allows the steel to absorb a bit of the thermal energy but more importantly creates a nice convection current of air behind the shield.  With this shield we lowered the distance down to 12" from the stove to the wall and thereby made our friendly neighborhood home inspector much happier.  Which makes us much happier.

Once the heat shield was up the install was mostly through and we were down to finish work.  JD found some nice tin paneling to cover up the stainless and her parents donated the gigantic bronze bucket that holds our kindling and matches.

Once it was all in and set we ordered a 1/2 cord of wood and stacked it out back under some cover.  That 1/2 cord lasted us all winter with about an 1/8 of a cord left and in early June (last month) we ordered another 1/2 cord.  That is now stacked and seasoning.  One of the major benefits of such a small stove is that it takes about an 8" long log comfortably.  This means that because most "cut and split" wood is 14-16 inches long you have to cut all your split wood once more before you use it but because it burns so effectively you still get about the same burn time for each load.  Less BTUs yeah, but the space fits the stove so it's not under heated.

In retrospect I don't know why we waited so long to put a wood stove in.  My wife is ALWAYS cold and spends the majority of her time from November till March curled up in an electric blanket with 2 sweaters on while she shivers.  My enduring memory from this last winter will be the time I looked over at her sitting in the brown chair to the left of the stove, realized it was 12 degrees outside, our heat was set to 62 and she was in a t-shirt and yoga pants while she calmly sipped her tea and worked on her laptop.