Potential stove pipe leaks

[Mr. Kelly]

Hi everyone,

Today I completed a massive cleaning of my PT Summit and interior stove pipe.

After I was done, I thought of something I would try tonight, just to get an idea of how airtight my system is inside the house. I took the baffle out and put a flashlight shining up into the stove pipe to see if I could notice any places that could be airflow problems.

Lo and behold, when I turned the lights off in the room, I saw several places where the light from the flashlight was shining through along the pipe. Mostly, the light was coming out of a 3 foot section of expanding pipe… see photo. on this pipe, there are about 2” x 1/8” slots along the lower part of the pipe and up along the top. There’s all kinds of light shining through there.

I stuck my head in the stove to look up, to see if I could see any obvious areas of concern, and the only thing that I saw that might be relative were places where the interior wall of the pipe looked like it was pushed in a bit, presumably where screws were driven through when it was professionally installed.

Mind you, this system has been in place for roughly 15 years, and I haven’t noticed any detrimental effects related to any of these problems… But I have no idea, clearly… 😩😩

I’ve included two pictures, one from the front so you can see what the system looks like, and the other is a very bad picture looking up the pipe, the best I could.

What do you think? Thoughts?

 

[MongoMongoson]

The stove pipe I have (Selkirk DSP) uses short screws to attach outer wall to outer wall. They are short enough to not push in the interior wall. Maybe, shorter screws?

It is not uncommon for stove pipe to not seat together perfectly. I know mine leaks some air. As long as your draft is adequate and you are not seeing excessive creosote accumulation it should not be a big concern. The air will be sucked into the stove pipe by the draft.

If it were my stove pipe, I would feel the need to do something about that now that it has been seen.

If that blower above the stove blows into a room where people sleep, that is probably a code violation. It would be good to make sure you have a CO detector in the room it blows into.