I am looking at removing the wood burner in my lounge that has a wetback connected to the hot water cylinder.

My question is, when removing the wetback, can I just run a pipe between the outlet and inlet of the hot water cylinder, creating a short loop that replaced the wetback plumbing? Or, can I simply cap the outlet from the hot water cylinder?

The cylinder is from the 70's and I estimate the same for the burner, if that make a difference. There is no way of shutting off the wet back piping that I can see.