Last night we had an amazingly productive conversation with Vanessa, our Kimberly Stove dealer from Tiny House Big Life. She's really awesome. Yesterday morning I sent her an email to let her know that we're going to start our Kimberly install this week and asked if she had any pieces of advice for us. She set up a phone conference time for yesterday evening, and walked us through the entire process step by step. It turns out she wrote the installation guide for the Kimberly, so there's truly no better person to have on the phone to answer your questions.
Armed with our notes from last night's phone conversation, we set out this morning to dry fit our chimney to our Kimberly Stove. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem right off the bat. After positioning our stove on the spot we taped out on the floor of the Tiny House, we tried to fit the first piece of the chimney to the back of the stove. It didn't fit.
This didn't cause nearly the kind of the concern you might expect, as I was totally confident that if we got in touch with Vanessa, she'd help us out. Really, she's raising the bar for customer service in my mind. We did some research and looking at the product line from the company which manufactures the chimney pipe (BDM), we think we identified the problem. Even though the billing slip told us that we had been shipped a "Starter Tee" pipe, looking at the actual product in hand it appeared that we had a normal Tee pipe, which is fitted differently at the end. So we sent Vanessa an email with this information, the photo above, and my drawing below, asking her what could be done.
We got an email back within the hour. Vanessa was traveling to a wood stove conference, and so wasn't able to chat, but instead forwarded our email to the inventor of the Kimberly stove, Roger Lehet from Unforgettable Fire. He wrote us back almost immediately explaining that the starter tee was actually a new product, and that prior to it being available, the way that Kimberlies were normally installed was to take a pair of avionic shears to a normal Tee, cut away the rolled edge about an inch in from the pipe, and fit the cut edge of the Tee pipe over the Kimberly exhaust pipe.
We didn't have a pair of avionic shears laying around, so we took the pipe to a local metal working shop, and they were able to give us a nice clean cut on our pipe. But, when we brought it back out to the barn, we had a new problem: it still didn't fit. Further investigation revealed that the company which manufactured our chimney pipe is a different company from the one that Unforgetable Fire used to deal with. The old chimney pipe company manufactured a normal Tee which, when the end was cut off, fit nicely over the Kimberly output pipe. The normal Tee from the new chimney pipe company (apparently) does not.
The good news is that the special Starter Tee from the new chimney pipe company is designed to fit with the Kimberly exhaust pipe. Vanessa was super awesome about the whole thing, and once she was out of her conference, was able to order a Starter Tee for us from the chimney manufacturer.
Tl;DR: If your Starter Tee from BDM doesn't fit into your Kimberly, confirm that it's not in fact a normal Tee. If it is a normal Tee instead of a Starter Tee, don't cut into it, that's not going to work. Instead get it exchanged for a proper Starter Tee.
We were able to continue working on the project without the proper starter tee by duct taping the normal tee into place and using that to figure out were the cathedral ceiling box should be placed. All this took a while, so after we had marked the location of the ceiling box, we decided to call it a night. Tomorrow we start cutting into out roof (yikes!)
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