If you missed part one of the venting demonstration, you can read/watch it here. If you have questions about buying and venting a new pellet stove, call us at 1-800-495-3196

If you’re going to be doing a vertical installation and going up through the roof and doing that on the outside of the house, there’s actually two different ways that you can do it. The first way that we’ll go over it is, you again take the three inch pipe adapter and hook that onto the back of your appliance and secure that with a clamp. Hook on your three inch diameter pipe, go out through the wall using the wall thimble. And once you get to the outside of the house, you would install what’s called a three inch to four inch clean out tee. And you want to make sure you have your clean out tee so that you’re able to take the cap off and clean your venting out as you go vertically. Otherwise you would have to take your whole venting system apart. But you would attach this on to the venting and then you would go up from there through the roof and terminate.

Now if you wanted to start off with four inch diameter venting right away off the back of the unit, you would use a three to four inch pipe adapter. And so you would go onto the back of the stove put your clamp on, then what you would do is you would hook this directly onto your four inch pipe. And then using a four inch wall thimble, you would go out of the home and then at that point, you could either terminate if you are doing a horizontal installation or you could put on a four inch clean out tee and go up and out through the roof of your home.

One thing that’s very important no matter how you put the venting together, whether it’s a vertical installation, whether it’s a horizontal installation, you want to make sure that you have adequate clean out tee’s and ways to clean the venting so that you don’t have to tear the venting completely apart every time you want to clean your appliance.

You want to make sure and check your venting at least once a month to make sure that it’s free from debris. And make sure that you take your clean out tees off and clean all debris out from the chimney system. If your appliance has been installed correctly, and if your home is balanced and you have fresh air hooked to the unit, you could get by for several months without cleaning your venting system. When you’re installing a MagnuM fireplace insert or Country Flame fireplace insert, you want to make sure that the venting configuration is designed from the beginning for ease of maintenance, ease of installation and so that it won’t come apart when you put the appliance into the fireplace.

What we’ll do in this section is explain a few things that can be done. When you’re designing your fireplace insert, and if that fireplace happens to be on the outside of the wall, you may want to terminate the venting by cutting a hole – access hole through the back of the masonry fireplace and go right outside so that you can have a vertical termination. And then seal off your chimney. But if you need to go up the chimney as in the case of the chimney being on the interior of the home, you’re going to want to prepare things. And the first thing you want to do is clean the chimney system. So call up yourself a professional chimney cleaner, have him come in, and have him check the chimney for cracks and things. Clean it out very well. Clean the entire fireplace opening. And then seal it so that you won’t get any of the old creosote and smoke smell that was in your wood burning fireplace. Once that’s been done and your fireplace insert is ready to insert in, there’s a few things that you want to do ahead of time to assure that you’ll be able to get the fireplace out. And the first thing is, is design your system so that the venting will be flexible. And typical installation would be, depending on the appliance is you would, again, hook on the three inch adapter onto the back of the unit. Or in some cases, you would want to hook on the three to four inch adapter. Because if your chimney is thirty feet tall, you’re going to want to switch over to four inch.

Our manufacturer’s recommendation is, is that immediately after you leave the fireplace chamber, that you would go with four inch liner all the way up and out the chimney system. This is not a code requirement but it is something that we as manufacturers would like you to do to get the best benefit and to make sure that you don’t have operational problems. So typically what would happen is you would hook a clean out tee onto the pipe adapter or you can use a special clean out tee that has the adapter built right into it. And you hook that on to the back of the unit and secure it very tightly. Make sure that your clean out tee is sitting at a forty five degree angle coming off the back of the unit.

The reason you want to do that is when you hook the flex tubing that goes onto the unit onto the clean out tee, you want to be able to flex this thing in different directions so that it can go up from the back of the unit up around and go up the chimney system allowing enough flexibility in the system so that you’ll be able to pull the unit out should you need servicing in the future. You want to make sure that you have some type of a flex in kind of like an S curve that’s built into the flex system so that that unit will move in and out of the unit freely. Once that’s done, you could put rigid pipe or you could hook flex liner onto the end of this system and go up and out the chimney system making sure that you seal both the bottom and the top of the chimney and insulate the top two feet of the chimney system.

You’re also going to have to make sure that you can route your fresh air safely and adequately. The best way to route your fresh air is go down and out the bottom of the fireplace insert and out through an ash dump or out through the back of the existing fireplace. If you have to go up through the chimney system, make sure that when you go up and out that you do not terminate the fresh air close to the exit for the exhaust or contaminated exhaust will come down the fresh air and into the system and it will contaminate the fire.

There are several types of termination caps that you would put onto the top when you terminate a fireplace insert. This is a typical one here. It’s called a vertical termination cap. When you put these on, you want to make sure and check them periodically through the winter to make sure they don’t fill up with debris, birds don’t try to build something in there and/or it freezes over and causes the appliance to malfunction.