the right chimney hood?

Ah. Now I can help you there..

When faced with two inglenooks that smoked very very badly, I did some net research..and eventually found just ONE site that had the information I needed.

What you need to know is that at the hood exit - provided its smoothly curved anyway, you should have no more than 5 to 7 times the area of the cross section of the hood aperture, available as the area around the hood - between its circumference and the level at which the fire is.

Now in a GOOD inglenook, with a properly corbelled flue entry and a reasonably low aperture, you don't need as hood at all.

The first thing to do is to measure the flue area where it exits the ingle nook. As I said, if its properly corbelled this will equal the floor area of the inglenook itself - the fact that it narrows later on is not a problems as long as you have about a one foot square flue up the stack. And the wider part of the flue extends well upwards. The inlaws have such and the stack does not narrow into its final size until the top of the floor above.

Now you have to measure the aperture of the inglenook - essentially its frontal area. If this is less than 5 times the floor area you should have a good setup that needs no hood.

In my case however I simply had a one foot square flue in a flat topped inglenook and no 'smoke chamnber' at all. I curse the builder who said it would work.

In essence I built smoke hoods to reduce the aperture and form the smoke chamber.

When doing this INSIDE the inglenook you have to forget about the walls of the nook and leave them out completely. In may case with exactly one square foot of exit, I had to limit myself to an aperture - the area between the base of the hood and the grate (not the inglenook floor by the way - just where combustion takes place - we have raised grates on dogs)to no more than 7 square feet at most. In our case this meant a hood that was slightly larger than the grate and low enough over it to reduce the air gap and get enough airflow speed to suck any stray smoke into it. Its not totally perfect - the room always smells slightly of wood smoke in winter - but we rather like that anyway.

Our hood was about 3ft x 2ft so really it had to be no more than a foot above the grate. ( 3ft wide plus two 2ft sides is 7ft, times one foot is

7 square feet). In fact its a bit higher than that, and isn't perfect. We could prop the grate up on blocks, but round tuits are in short supply.

What is useful, is to mock up the hood itself using stiff cardboard and masking tape, and build a small fire out of whatever..you DON NOT want a hot fire as its both dangerous and also will have a higher flue velocity. A nasty smokey 'i've just been lit with wet wood' one is what you want. You will see the way the air gets drawn in and the smoke retained.

In our case the biggest problem is stuff that burns near the edges of the grate or rolls out of it smouldering. There isn't enough draught to cope with that.

Once you have established the hood size, you have the fun of getting one made. Try a blacksmith.

Good luck.