Woodstove Redux: Educating Your Building Inspector

I posted a few weeks ago about our wood stove, and I’d hoped to follow up sooner. But now I understand a common way in which men are irritating.

The folks in our municipal inspections office are pretty easy to deal with — in fact, I’ve found dealing with both Beverly and Salem city governments to be really easy and low-stress. Until I decided to do something they didn’t know a whole lot about.

Almost a month ago, I’m standing in the inspector’s office armed with what I’ve been told is a bulletproof plan to make a heat shield out of copper sheet metal (see pics) that will sit on the wall, so that my “solid fuel appliance” can be set farther back in the corner, preserving precious space in my little house. The guy who told me this stuff is a 30 year installer of wood stoves here in Massachusetts.

You know that dream, where you’re naked in 7th grade and everyone’s laughing at you? The whole office full of guys made fun of me! “You can’t just make something yourself and expect it to pass” and “Why do you think they make pots out of copper…you’ll burn your house down….” The chief inspector told me that he’d accept a course of brick set behind the stove — brick! — as a heat shield unless I showed him something in writing from the UL or the manufacturer.

Doing some research set me back by a week; I’m a busy guy during the school year. When I went back to them, I had documentation on the fireproof pad the stove was set on, the installation manual from Vermont Castings, and documentation from the company that makes the nifty little ceramic spacers you buy at any fireplace store.

Plus, I had the page from the National Fire Prevention Code that says a sheet metal heat shield is over twice as effective as one made out of brick. And some stuff from the Hearth.com forums that says the heat shield is meant to reduce the heat hitting the wall from 300 degrees to about 150, and that wood stoves don’t get as hot as the corona of the frickin’ sun. I walked in with about 30 pages of printer paper, plus my drawings.

The chief inspector was a little sheepish — but I try not to be a jerk when I’m right.

Today I have a functioning wood stove, a signed permit, and…it’s going to be really nice and warm and sunny for a while.

My point is, you can’t depend on inspectors to tell you how to do things, because you can’t depend on them to KNOW how to do things. I don’t mean to put anybody down; when I interacted with them, what I listened to was a kind of know-it-all nay-saying, instead of understanding the way this process works. And they did keep saying “Show me where it says you can do that.” When I did, they were nice and easy to deal with.

What these guys do is read the building code. My guess is they do know a lot about construction — and they read the product manuals and spec sheets. You should too. If I’d known enough to do my research first (and show my work), I’d have saved myself a lot of frustration.

So…voila. The copper heat shield needs a cleaning, and an ornamental molding to cover the screws, but….

I call her “Darth,” my fully armed and operational wood stove.