Installing a Wood Stove in a House With No Chimney

A house with no chimney can still take a freestanding wood or pellet stove. What gets installed is a Class A insulated chimney system — a manufactured, double or triple-wall, insulated pipe rated for solid fuel that forms a complete chimney in its own right. It goes in where no masonry exists, and once it is up it does the job a masonry chimney would have done.

ABC Chimney Solutions installs these regularly, most often in additions, converted spaces and older Connecticut houses whose original chimney was removed decades ago.

The two routes

Straight up through the building

The pipe rises from the stove through the ceiling, through any floors above, through the attic and out of the roof. It passes through an insulated support box or ceiling support at each penetration, keeping the required clearance to framing all the way.

The advantage is performance: a chimney running inside the heated envelope stays warm, and a warm chimney drafts better and stays cleaner. The trade-off is that it takes floor area on every level it passes through, and the route has to miss joists, rafters and anything else in the way.

Out through the wall and up outside

The pipe goes horizontally through the wall behind the stove, then turns and runs up the exterior on brackets to above roof height.

The advantage is that it takes no interior space and is usually simpler to install. The trade-off is that the chimney is outside in Connecticut winter air, which means it starts colder, takes longer to establish draft and builds deposits more readily. It is a perfectly good installation — it just needs to be understood as the colder of the two.

What is fixed and not negotiable

Several things about a stove installation come from the manufacturer's instructions rather than from preference, and they are what a proper installation is built around.

• Clearance to combustibles. The distance from the stove body and from the connector pipe to any combustible surface. Shielding can reduce it, but only shielding built the way the manufacturer specifies.
• The hearth. Its size, its construction and how far it extends in front of and to the sides of the appliance.
• Chimney height above the roof. Governed by the 3-2-10 rule: at least three feet above the point it exits the roof, and at least two feet higher than anything within ten feet horizontally.
• Total height and route. Enough overall height for the system to draft, and the connector geometry the appliance requires.

Those requirements exist for the same reason in every case: repeated high heat reaching a surface that was not intended for it is a fire risk, and clearance is what prevents it.

Pellet stoves are a different system

A pellet stove is fan-assisted, runs at lower flue temperatures and normally vents through a dedicated pellet vent rather than a Class A chimney, often horizontally through a wall. Both are wood and pellet stove installation, but the venting is not interchangeable and the manufacturer's requirements differ.

How the job runs

It starts with looking at the room, the intended stove and the possible routes, because the route decides most of the cost and all of the performance. Then the system is specified, the penetrations are made and flashed, the chimney is assembled and supported, the stove is set on its hearth, connected, and checked for draft.

Where the work touches other trades — structural questions, electrical for a pellet stove — ABC Chimney Solutions can coordinate a qualified professional, or work with one you have chosen.

The system itself is Class A chimney pipe, and there are photographs of installations we have completed on the projects page.