Princess Auto's Wood Burning Stove -- Cat. No. 8282303

I've long dreamt of having a wood stove in my workshop, both for auxiliary heat, and to usefully dispose of woodworking off-cuts. (If you do any amount of woodworking, you soon find yourself up to your ears in off-cuts.) So, when Princess Auto put their little wood stove on special, I went and got one. Here it is still in its box.

And here it is out of its box.

You have to attach the four feet with the screws and nuts provided.

Right on the label on the box it says, "This heater is not C.S.A. or U.L. approved and is not intended for residential installation. Using this heater in an insured structure will void the fire insurance coverage."

Hmmm.

Moving right along, here's the stove assembled and sitting where I'd like it to be.

The lid pivots on a single 1/4"-20 nut-and-bolt, and opens like so.

The flue opening at the back is 6" diameter. It's a sort of a socket affair.

The intake draft control is obvious down in front. On top, between the lid and the flue opening, there's a tiny draft control that I don't really understand the use of. A few more points about the stove:

• The only way to clean out ash accumulation is via the lid.
• The stove has no grate inside -- just the naked sheet metal bottom.
• The instruction booklet advises you to add a 2 1/2" deep layer of sand or fine gravel to the bottom of the heater. The booklet goes on to say, "Sand can be installed between the corrugated liner and the heater body to lengthen heater life and hold heat." Hmmm. I really don't see how it would be possible to do that.

The way that I mean to have this thing installed, it will have to function with a 4" diameter flue pipe. I found a 6" to 4" HVAC reducer at the Home Depot. With that, and a length of aluminum dryer vent tubing to vent the thing out a window above, I built a small trial fire in the stove to see how it would work. That seems to have been a success -- the fire drew nicely out through the 4" diameter tubing.

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Anyway, that's the story so far. I knew from the get-go that my plan here was fraught with difficulty, and this little project may end up getting filed under 'folly'. We'll see.

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Update -- FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2016

I've abandoned the project, and put the stove back in its box to await the day when I can put it to use somewhere more suitable. What I had in mind was just too complicated and dangerous to carry on with.

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