Hi, was wondering if anybody could help me identifying which chimney type I have. The house is a terrace house built in the 1890s and we currently has a living flame gas fire installed. The other houses on the terrace have chimney stacks with small pots on top. Ours does not have the stack but does have a small chimney pot with (I think) a cowl. We'd like to install a gas fire which requires a "conventional chimney" type but I'm unsure whether we can? From what I can tell it seems we once had conventional but now have a prefab flue - not sure why anyone would do that though. Can anyone help? Thanks
Hi, was wondering if anybody could help me identifying which chimney type I have. The house is a terrace house built in the 1890s and we currently has a living flame gas fire installed. The other houses on the terrace have chimney stacks with small pots on top. Ours does not have the stack but does have a small chimney pot with (I think) a cowl. We'd like to install a gas fire which requires a "conventional chimney" type but I'm unsure whether we can? From what I can tell it seems we once had conventional but now have a prefab flue - not sure why anyone would do that though. Can anyone help? Thanks
You need to know whether you have a 'class 1' or 'class 2' flue, which I think correspond to "conventional" or "prefab" respectively.
I think living flame gas fires may either require class 1 or class 2 flues, depending on the fire; so it's possible you have either of these.
Note the *I think*; but what I can tell you for sure is that it's quite common for original class 1 flues in old houses to be downgraded to class 2. They were built to take open fires, and the combustion products over the years damages the lining of the flue, often rendering them unsafe and/or leaking gases. In later years, when people were installing gas fires, a common solution was to fit a liner to the chimney, making it safe for a gas fire, but only a class 2 one.
In my own house, which is a similar age to yours, we had a Grand Plan to replace the gas fire with a solid fuel stove; however investigations turned up a liner which went vertically upwards then snaked diagonally upards across a wall and then upwards in a bedroom, inside a plasterboard partition which had been built adjacent to the bedroom chimney breast; then in the roof space snaked back to rejoin the original chimney stack. I can only guess at the reason, but needless to say, we ended up with a class 1 gas stove instead!
Thanks for this info it's just what I needed confirming!. I've got a feeling that it has been lined and that the metal thing on top of the pot is part of it. Anyway, I'm going to remove the gas fire this week and see if I can identify the flue type from there. Am I right in saying that if the lining, if there is one, is more than 7" diameter then it is classed as class 1 and between 5" and 7" is class 2?
Don't you just love the surprises old properties have in store!
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