Waste of a good woodburning stove

Apologies for the drop in activity -- I've been out-of-town and my internet connections did not pan out.

The other day we were looking at a house up north with a woodburning stove in the basement. Since the lot was heavily wooded, a woodburning stove was a great addition to aid in the warming of the house and transistion past Peak Oil. Unfortunately, the design of it was less than brilliant -- the stove pipe was routed from the basement to the roof outside of the house. It was such a bizarre thing to do, I could hardly imagine why they had done so. Besides the obvious loss of heat for warming the inside of the house, putting the stovepipe outside drastically increases the rate of creosote buildup. This raises the risk for chimney fires and constricts the air flow within the pipe.

The benefits of the wood stove could be recaptured by enclosing the pipe with brick and busting out the old exterior section, or by simply re-routing the pipe through the interior of the house. Both options are easy enough in concept, but a pain to implement on an already completed house and stove. This is just another prime example of why it's so important to lay out your entire system before you build it in order to save loads of work later on.