Rob,
We put a wood stove to heat our new house. I almost did the installation myself but the HVAC installer did the job. I should have done it myself since the chimney is not straight. What we should have done was get a chimney sweep to do it or at least asked. But for some reason we did not think to do this. The sweep we use gave us a qoute to straighten the chimney and when we have the cash we will get it done.
But right now it works so leave it alone.
I wanted someone else to do the installation for liability reasons. The insurance company asked alot of questions about that wood stove. They wanted to know who installed it as well as licenses, permits, and inspections. They did not like the stove. Too many fires I guess.
But we have a finished concrete floor. A spark or even a log falling out of the stove is not going to do a thing except smoke up the house.
On the installation, we used double wall stove pipes and went straight up into the attic. We had to do some 45 degree bends to get around the roof ridge. You want to be as straight as possible for good draw. I think the rule is to not have more than 180 degrees of turns in the pipe.
The stove needs to be certain distances from combustables per the stove manual. That differs from stove to stove and how they are configured.
I assume the barn would leak enough air to not have to worry about combustion air. We put in a six inch PVC pipe under the slab to get combustion air to the stove. Some say you don't need to do this. Others say you do. It easy to put it at the start, all but impossible to retrofit. So it went in and works great. My FIL did this with his fireplace.
Later,
Dan