Questions on box wood stoves

I picked up an old box wood stove today for 75 bucks. Been looking at moving to wood heat during the day and then just burning oil at night like my parents house. The area of the house I am going to place it is 18 feet to the ceiling. I was thinking that lenght of stove pipe will add to the warming of my house as I have an open loft setup for the second story.

I saw on youtube that this one guy hooked up brass pipe to the outside of his stove pipe to heat water as well.

Has anyone else used such a long stove pipe?

Plus, has anyone rigged up any mehtod to pull outside air into the stove so it does not pull cold air into your home? Is it safe to pull air from your crawl space?

My wife thinks I am going to burn down the house. Even when she knows my parents house has been using one for 30 years now.

it is a simple matter to add a flue robber to your stove pipe. There is commercially made ones or you can use two T's and four 90's to make your own.
The pipe coming off off your stove gets a T then a 90 on both sides of that. Add the other two 90's onto those which connects back into the next T which gets mounted on the pipe going to the ceiling.

before you do any install of said stove check with your house insurance people..they might not cover you if the place does catch fire and make sure you have plenty of room around the stove..

So it looks like a box square? thats a pretty cool Idea. Does it reduce ash from working its way up the pipe? Looks like it will add to the heating of my home as well. Might even mount a fan on the other side of it.

You are better off installing a heat exchanger in the firebox itself. If you put a coil or other device on the stove pipe, you risk cooling the exaust gasses too much too fast and coating the pipe with creasote. I could go into detail on how to do this right if you want but I think you can find all the information on yahoo. Look up "wood stove hot water"

P.S. extra points are awarded for using just a thermosyphon

thanks for the tip, I looked it up and found some people have been hurt from from steam blowing the side out of their copper piping.

Keep the tips coming, I am going to get this thing rolling by this weekend. This Global Warming has us down to the 20's here in Virginia. LOL.

They were stupid. ALWAYS include a pressure release device (preferabily two) as close as possible to the heat exchanger.


Mine works great.

You don't want to pull outside air. It makes your stove run dirtier and colder.