Chimney Pot Identification

[WeeBob]

'evening

This photo shows two chimneys on the same wall.

The chimney on the left links internally to a regular fireplace.

The chimney on the right has no (apparent) link inside the house.

Both are on the wall of the same room.

i.e. it looks like the chimney on the right has been blocked off internally.

It looks like they were both built at the same time.

So what would the chimney on the right be for? The pot is a different type would that be a clue?

A neighbour thought that the room may have been a kitchen sometime in the past. Is that a clue too?

i.e. maybe some kind of ventilation flue.

And advice gratefully received.

Thanks

[Tim+]

Probably an old boiler/Aga flue. Modern boilers nearly all exit horizontally through a coaxial flue. Inspection requirements make reuse of an existing vertical flue unfavourable.

Tim

[spuorgelgoog]

How old is the building?

Kitchen range and a separate copper for hot water?

I would have guessed the left one might have been for a copper in a lean-to wash-house, originally, rather than venting from the house. A copper in the kitchen would usually have shared the kitchen range chimney.

Owain

[damduck-egg]

Wash copper Large Bowl heated by its own fire for doing laundry ,

That you did not know what a copper is when associated with a kitchen just goes to show how terms come and go as things become obsolete. There will probably be a few people alive who may have lived in a house with one, I'm in my 60's and can remember them being talked about enough by parents and grandparents that the term Copper in the context of how it was written was obvious. Younger people won't be. We used one salvaged from somewhere as a cattle trough for years. G.Harman

[harry]

In days of yore, (pre 1960s) virtually every room had it's own fireplace. I removed four surplus fireplaces and chimneys from my present house.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The cowel on the right hand chimney is typical of the type fitted to a Geyser (old open-flued instant gas water heater). These were usually fitted in the kitchen or bathroom. They're now illegal in bathrooms, (and I think in anywhere in a rented property) due to too many carbon monoxide deaths in the bath.

[Davidm]

I've got one of those cowels (the one on the right) fitted on top of a pot on top of a high chimney stack on my 1900 semi, looks bloody awful but a long way up from the ground to do anything about it. There's a flue liner from there down to the kitchen and the old cast iron lump Potterton CH boiler (with no fan, just relied on heat to vent the exhaust). Probably not the safest setup! All disconnected now, new CH boiler and balanced flue through side wall of house, but that cowel still irriates me.

[AnthonyL]

Without a copper we wouldn't have had enough hot water to fill the galvanised iron bathtub for our weekly scrub-up in front of the living room fire on a Sunday morning.

[DerbyBorn]

[e-mail] (AnthonyL) wrote in

Shared water of course!.

[WeeBob]

Thanks for all the ideas.

Weebob

[spuorgelgoog]

Heathen.

Should have been Saturday night bath so clean for church (and no work done on the Sabbath)

Owain

[Bob Eager]

I'm in my sixties and I have heard of coppers. Never seen one, I don't think.

My mum used a Baby Burco, though.

[Tim Lamb]

Not been following but there are 3 flues forming our kitchen range chimney. One for the bedroom above, one for the range itself and one connecting through the side of the brickwork about 6' above floor level: presumably for *the copper*.

The previous farm tenants had taken in washing as part of their income along with the sale of Rabbits. My father took over the tenancy in 1938 and the laundry had been moved to an outbuilding. The *copper* was subsequently used for cooking Beetroot. A job for us kids on Friday night.

[Chris Green]

I'm 70, we had a copper in a cottage in Suffolk that we bought in 1953 (my family bought it that is). I think the previous occupants had been using it, we didn't and regarded as rather a 'quaint feature'.

[spuorgelgoog]

Boiling beetroots was how Alan Sugar started, and he didn't do too badly.

Owain

[Roger Hayter]

i just remember one when I was an infant in the v early 1950s. I think it was galvanised (steel) though. I can't remember what we actually called it. Though 'copper' and mangle were rapidly replaced by a top-loading washing machine and a spin-dryer, probably before I was four.

[Terry Casey]

Cowel? You mean that obnoxious git on telly in something like Opportunity Knocks but without Hughie Green?

I know what you mean - I wouldn't like him perched on my chimney, either!

[damduck-egg]

Hughie Green was a fairly obnoxious person as well.

I first heard about this opinion of him by someone who worked in the entertainment industry I was chatting to on a train journey back in the 70's over the shared table.

Things revealed or made more public in more recent times show it was an opinion not entirely unjustified.

G.Harman

[AnthonyL]

Well they could only fit two of us kids in at a time - don't remember when the parents got theirs, afterwards I hope.

[Graham.]

And for puddings to sing in. (Charles Dickins).