As a child Ben remembers growing up with an Aga wood stove. His wife shared a similar upbringing having grown up on a property off-grid and her family using an Everhot stove with wetback (water jacket) to heat all their domestic hot water needs.
Ben's parents had long since upgraded to a Thermalux Grand Cuisine and so when he saw a second-hand Thermalux Supreme advertised, and although they live on the north coast of NSW where their solar hot water produces plenty of heat and the climate isn’t all that cold, he thought it would make a great feature for their house.
After contacting the owner and checking the condition, Ben discovered that the stove had come out of a house that was being demolished and it needed a lot of work. It had a lot of parts missing but it seemed solid, so he purchased it and started pulling it apart.
First he removed all the fire bricks and drilled out all the pop rivets to make it possible to wire wheel the lot. Next was sanding back the top and the aluminium handles. The family decided that a charcoal colour suited their style of home, so after the unit had been cleaned up with a prep wash, the top of the unit was taped up and the body was given five coats of
Charcoal Stove Bright paint. A final four coats of Pot Belly Black paint on top finished the job. Even though this was a repaint from scratch, one of the benefits of using paint over enamel, for example, is that it will never chip and you can touch up whenever you like bringing your colour back to brand new for years and years. And, if you ever felt like a change of style you can simply repaint over the top with a different colour.
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It now looks as good as new, and we feel that the quality of this Australian Made product made it possible to restore it to such great condition."
Ben got in contact with our team at WISELIVING and sent through some photos of the unit as well as the serial number. We were able to confirm that his unit was 19 years old! Having manufactured the Thermalux Range of products for decades, we have had many families contact us over the years to say their stoves are still running brilliantly even 30 years from purchase. Ben ordered new fire bricks, hot plate, two chrome covers, seals, grates, heat exchanger and a 22 litre header tank from WISELIVING and assembled it all back together.
Ben engaged a plumber that he knew and was very interested in the restoration to help him run the pipe work after working out how to get it all connected up to our existing solar hot water tank. Now the family can enjoy beautiful radiant warmth, traditional home cooking and get their hot water for free throughout the winter months via wood and throughout the summer months via solar.
Thank you to Ben and his family for sharing your Thermalux restoration project with us. We are so happy to see her saved from ending up in landfill to find a new home contributing to a sustainable future.

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