luckily it wasn't last night, it was the beginning of the week. Both flues were damaged and needed to have the inner liners removed and replaced with the dual wall inner liners. One of the local masons dropped everything and got the flue for the furnace working for them. They have 3 teenage girls and 8 inside pets—everything from 3 dogs to other little critters and couple reptiles. So they're okay, it could have been last night! Stuff like that happens a lot around here.
Update in the off-chance this info helps anyone out there: I got the stove in 2019, ordered a replacement catalyst in November 2021, and just installed it today. 4 years with the same catalyst suited me just fine with the normal routine maintenance you'd read about throughout the threads in this website. I stayed with the stainless steel construction. The future may bring me to a ceramic model one day, but at this point I don't know enough about them to make a determination.
In the next week I'm going to regasket the stove, pick up a spare catalyst and otherwise give this thing the once over. I'll add something that has been a bit of a lurking controversy over the years on this and other forums- I decided to replace the firebrick with a set of soapstone firebrick for basically no real reason. I've searched up comments to see if anyone had done it and there were some comments that it had been done but no real discussion of it, and additionally it was kind of an odd conversation bump to get into describing how the stove was a "Woodstock Soapstone Stove" and then the next comment need to be answered with "well no, this model doesn't have any soapstone". This wont make it an actual soapstone liner, but after 5 years with this, I believe that if there was a noticeable difference I'd be able to come close to describing it. Last comment for now is I contacted Woodstock and asked specifically if they had a firebrick kit / if there was a soapstone kit for it and they said yes and priced me each, so I decided to go for it, and I'm only a couple hours away so I'll take a ride and see what else is going on up there. It is however worth noting, that a soapstone firebrick option is not currently available on the website so that might be a bit of omen of things to come.
I've never had the impression Woodstock coddled their website like some other manufacturers do. Is your firebrick showing signs of age or is this more of 'souping it up' not unlike going to Zares 50 years ago to pick up new hubcaps for the car ?
A few have cracked, but none have crumbled, putting me in a position of doing this basically because I want to and curiosity is gnawing at me. Had a few beers in the backyard with my buddy last night and his take on it was “this is the equivalent of the guy lifting his truck an inch just to drive it to Costco?” Possibly the right take, but certainly funny. Won’t know for several months anyway- it’s in the 80s here. Backwoods Savage absolutely, will do.
