Can you put a TV above a wood burning stove?

The physics you are designing around

Heat rises off a stove in a plume, and a television is an electronic device with a stated maximum operating temperature. Those two facts are the entire problem, and the design job is keeping the plume and the screen apart: enough vertical distance, something to break the rising heat, and a wall surface that does not cook.

A stove recessed in a chimney breast helps enormously, because the breast itself carries much of the heat up inside the masonry rather than up the face of the wall.

What makes it work in practice

Three elements, in combination: height, with the TV mounted well above the stove; a deflector, most often a substantial mantel or beam that interrupts the rising plume (a non-combustible Inglebeam is ideal where it must sit close); and sometimes a recess, setting the TV back into the wall out of the warm air path. We check surface temperatures against the layout rather than guessing, and the stove manufacturer clearances always hold.

What does not work: a TV flat on the wall directly in the plume of a freestanding stove with nothing between them. If that is the only arrangement the room allows, we will say so and offer the alternatives.

The honest alternatives

If the wall above your stove is not the right home for the TV, the room usually offers a better one: the alcove beside the chimney breast, a corner bracket, or furniture opposite. And if the fire-under-TV look is the brief, that is exactly what a media wall with an inset electric fire is engineered for, heat vented so the screen never sees it, and we build those complete.

A stove is a twenty-year purchase and a TV is replaced every few; designing the fireplace around the television is usually the wrong way round. The survey is where we balance the two honestly.

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