I have attached my cowl with three stainless steel screws to the flue liner and it's also sealed by fire cement and the flue is further secured to the cowl spiggot by a big jubilee clip. It's belt and braces+ but I think it should be ok. In my case I wanted to take no risks as I was concerned of the weight of the 13m of flue pulling on the cowl that sits on the chimney.
On your 'melting mastic', should you not have used fire cement which claims to harden more the hotter it gets?
MASTIC!*? whoever used MASTIC!
THAT is how it SHOULD be done.
Indeed. AND screws.
I didn't do that job, so I can blame someone else - a 'professional'. I am going to fit a stainless strap with screws. I hadn't thought about cement. Surely it doesn't need to be sealed at the top? The mechanical fixing will be enough I think.
Peter Scott
I fitted a wood burning stove on my narrow boat a few years back. Used car exhaust repair paste (Gun Gum) to seal all the leaky joints especially the chimney mounting collar to the roof of the boat.
There's very little that you can't burn in these stoves but wood is the best. As others have said, it needs to be dry, the drier the better. Fresh wood will be about 50% water. Evaporating all that takes a lot of heat, maybe even enough to put the fire out. It also puts a lot of moisture up the flue which can condense. This combines with other combustion products to form an acidic mixture. As dry wood contains anything up to 20% water, even this can produce condensation if the stove is burned slowly for long periods. You shouldn't use your stove at a low heat setting for long times. I give mine a good blast every day. The glass will also soot up when it's on low heat but this will clean off during a good fire. I start my fire by laying a bed of screwed up newspaper followed with some cardboard then dry kindling wood getting progressively bigger. It sounds long winded but I cleared the ashes, laid and lit a fire in just over 5 mins last night. You can burn plastics etc in moderation. They may be bad for the environment though. The alternative is largely landfill which is hardly beneficial. That's your decision but burn them with the door closed and the air supply at maximum. Some can burn very rapidly, sometimes even too rapidly for the air supply to keep up. That's when you get pops and blow backs. Keep the quantities small and you're OK. You will learn as you get used to it. One fuel I was warned off was pressure treated wood. A lot of this uses CCA, Copper Chromiun Arsnic. None of that stuff is nice and the resulting ash is also nasty. I had a wood technologist as my lodger at one time. He was not known for being a whimp (quite the opposite in fact) but he said if I burned treated wood he would leave. That convinced me. These stoves are controlled by throttling the air supply. When the air is restricted, the stove fills with unburned gases. When you open the door the fire can draw a good gulp of air and flare up. I always open the dampers before the door to reduce this effect. It also helps to get a good flow up the flue so when the door is opened, the smoke is already going the right way. Stoves are wonderful things, they beat gas fired "real flames" any day IMO. Use it, learn it and enjoy it.
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