Hearth

With our hearth done, the next step is to make our wood stove usable. We need to run some stove pipe up and out of the roof. First, we secured the stove to the floor so we have a steady starting point. I’d never drilled into masonry before, but it turns out that with a masonry bit it’s pretty easy. Everything is easy with the right tools.

Next we start building up the stove pipe from the back of the stove. This is the moment of truth, since I did my best to estimate the lengths necessary to vent the stove where we want it, but it was still just a guess.

Success! It landed right where we want it. The stove itself is located directly underneath a solar panel, so we can’t just have a straight pipe going up through the roof. We needed to come over a few feet to clear the panel. Yes, we could have moved the stove’s location, but we would have lost the ability to use the second starboard bench as a bed. It would have simply been too short.

So we cut a hole in the wood, then in the metal roof.

Then we cut a hole in the deck.

To keep any water from getting inside, we used the manufacturer’s flashing and some Henry’s roof tar. I was really impressed with this stuff, and would have used it far more often had I been familiar with it.

We finished by running the pipe all the way up and out the deck. The pipe has double wall construction and 1″ clearances to combustibles. I’ve made sure to test this part of the deck while the stove is running and it stays very cool.

We’re using their basic chimney cap up top. It seems to have no issues with either wind or rain so far. The last foot of pipe and the cap itself are able to be removed for travel.

Inside, we covered the ceiling hole with another piece of the DuraVent flashing. Nishi trimmed it to a perfect circle, and it looks great.

All that was left was to actually start her up!

The stove burns very nicely and, as advertised, we have a smokeless burn in around twenty minutes. I’m still playing around with finding the perfect fuel. The wood needs to be cut much shorter than anything I’m used to, and I haven’t found the sweet spot yet. I have found that the compressed sawdust logs I’ve used in larger wood stoves don’t work that well in here.

We still need insulating curtains over the windows to hold the heat generated by this little stove. The heat difference at the ceiling above the windows is dramatic, and along with a few small circulating fans the curtains will make this quite the toasty space.

Every home needs a hearth. It’s the beating heart of a living space. Our bus is no exception.

Our hearth is almost purely for aesthetics. The Kimberly woodstove we’re using has ridiculously tiny clearances, and we have given it much more room than is necessary. In addition, the vent pipe we’re using only has a 1″ clearance to combustibles, so let me preface all this by saying the space we’ve allocated is overkill.

We left a nearly 3′ by 3′ space between the two starboard benches, with the plan of fitting our woodstove right in the middle. Since we’re in a relatively tiny space, I made a hole in the floor for external combustion air. On top of that, we cut and attached our cement board. While the cement board could be helpful to deal with the heat, in practice it’s really just to keep the masonry in place while the wood elsewhere expands and contracts.

We’re using a thin cut brick for our hearth. They’re smaller than standard bricks, which works to our advantage. The thinner/smaller the building materials we’re able to use the more space we appear to have inside. We attached them to the cement board with Liquid Nails.

While Nishi was able to space out the bricks on the floor without a guide, we needed to cut some small spacers for our walls. Neither of us remember figuring this out in advance, but our hearth measurements perfectly accommodate our bricks. We didn’t need to make any tough cuts.

Our hearth looked pretty cool with bricks alone, but it still needed mortar between those joints.

The joints between our bricks are smaller than most, in part because our bricks are narrower to start. We tried at first using a tiny clay sculpting tool to lay the mortar, but it was imprecise and slow. We just adopted the finger-painting method. A word of warning to anyone who decides to give this a try: do not take breaks. The mortar dries your skin really quickly and will wear through your fingers before you realize it.

We let it sit a few days, then brushed and vacuumed away whatever was loose. It came out pretty clean.

Our stove will be sitting nearly dead center in the square. Again, total overkill for both stove and pipe clearances, but it’ll give us a good spot to store other stove-related items.

We had some brick left over, and used it to make a little accent wall along our counter.

Things are coming together, and as soon as the stove is good to go, we’ll be secure in our ability to work through the winter. Nishi took this fantastic picture one night after work.

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