Feeding kids aint cheap. Dad didn't get a major A/C upgrade until after I moved out. Hmmmm.

Our first purchase as a couple was a 5k BTU window AC unit. It took another ten years to get HVAC in our house later. Her dad was a commercial ductmaker/installer, made radius turns for it instead of plastic accordion hose branching off everywhere.

That house had a gas log set in the fireplace, single brick chimney and when we decided to put in a small Vermont stove I was calculating the stovepipe costs - at $1 an inch for flue pipe it was going to run more than the stove itself. I got to digging into code and all I was required to do was have "double brick equivalent" at the time. I had one course of brick, I installed a single stove pipe, done. City inspector was consulted along the way and he okd it.

I did that later as a temp flue outside same result, the last 6 feet get eaten alive by creosote and rot. We used to see in cartoons about tilted chimney pipes and now I understand it. Running the new chimney for an interior stove I went twin wall insulated stainless outside and it's working just fine. The clean out is 20 feet up but so far the two times I've pulled the access it wasn't needed at all. I run one of the creosote logs twice in the season but I finally am figuring out it's the smoke shelf filling up that is a bigger problem. Cleaning that gets a better draft. It's a special board and I have the dimensions wondering if a piece of heavy gauge stainless might be in order - and cheaper.

Its a New Englander, it came black but we painted it with hi temp spray before we installed it and it's almost primer red, but it matches a wallpaper elsewhere in the room. Of course the first time we fired it out on the front porch to cure it there was a lot of fumes, and it took the winter to get it to stop. 500 degrees will do that.