Woodstove Telemetry Kit - Too ambitious for first project?

I'd like to build a monitoring setup for my wood stove (to alarm on overtemp primarily). Initial effort would be one or two thermocouples to monitor surface and flue temps, data would be 'cooked' on a board near the stove, then passed via XBee to another board upstairs for LED readout and data logging. Future would be to add more sensors and power the monitoring board via Peltier generator.