Wall behind wood burner - alternative to render?

Yes. Masterboard/Multiboard is good. But its not cheap.

Ue firebroof cement to fill the screw holes and then just paint - it the paint doesn't take the heat, well find a paint that will take it.

Not especially if access is good. I think you are looking at £30 /sq m whatever yu do.

Fermacell. Tricky to find merchants who stock it though.

There is nothing visible to dry out in that case. It's all pretty permanent material. I believe the stove pipe is also stainless and is two pipes in one.

That's a lot fancier than a previous cottage. This setup looks like something right out of a magazine. It looks like it was "designed to pass an inspection" :-)

We have wood stove stores here, usually at least one in a city, and the proprietor knows the building code requirements.

As for plaster finishes on walls, plaster is a "moisture buffer". It does a better job at moisture buffering than gypsum board does. But on the other hand, if you abuse the plaster by intentionally drying it down to a low moisture content, that's going to want to crack it. It's normally dimensionally stable, because of the balance in the moisture between the room and the plaster. If you apply the heat to it, or encourage combustion air to enter the room (which ends up drier than the rest of the house), you could be drying out the local plaster.

It's possible your combustion device is too close to the wall, to meet code. In which case, someone should be able to tell you what barrier material will allow the device to be that close to the wall.

I can tell you a previous pot belly stove we had for heating, it would not have met any codes, or have been featured in a magazine :-) I guess all this fancy stuff counts as "progress".

My grandmothers house had a wood stove for cooking, complete with an oven. My mother tells me, when grandmother made Christmas dinner, the kitchen turned into a sauna from the heat, and you could be dripping sweat... while the rest of the house was relatively cold by comparison. That's how they used to live. And that stove figured into the heating setup. The stove was intended to keep a part of the house warm. A smaller heating device at the other end of the house, took the chill off down that end. Your choices were being drenched in sweat, or freezing to death. If you walked half way between the two zones, you had... comfort. There were no radiators or central heating with duct pipes in the house. In some ways, a city house, with cottage style heating.

Paul

I assume that "code" is the colonial equivalent to HETAS. ;-)

It was installed by a registered HETAS installer and signed off, so it met the regulations about 12 years ago.

Cheers

Dave R

Thanks - very useful!

Cheers

Dave R