Unlined chimneys don't last for ever either. The deposits are acidic and attack the mortar and bricks. The feathers and top of one of ours stacks was only still up there because of the stones being flat enough and heavy enough to stay there by gravity the mortar having long since reverted to sand from the inside, the outside looked fine...
It's a damn sight easier to replace a liner than rebuild the complete chimney stack because the mortar has failed all the way up it.
About 40 years ago I installed (Dutch Elm time?) a small enclosed log burner in the house we now live in. Brick built chimney (lime mortar) which may once have had a rendered liner.
No apparent problems with monoxide but smoke did occasionally arrive in other rooms. After a few years use, there was some tar staining on the internal plaster.
I don't know if it was ever swept but our builders managed to set fire to it.
I fitted an insulated stainless liner when I put the current log burner in.
>40 quid a metre for "1mm Thick Stainless Steel 316 Grade" doesn't make a thousand for my house. And that's retail pricing...
Andy
Haven't time to check the spec, but doesn't it have to be twin wall? Whatever, I assume that's the right stuff :-). Assume that the installer buys wholesale and charges retail. If it is only £40 a meter retail then cost is presumably roughly. Assuming 2.5m per storey including loft/chimney pot you need about 7.5m so call it 8. £320 for the liner. Assume £80 for all the fiddly bits to fit the top of the chimney and seal at the bottom gives £400 parts. £300 labour to cover the training, certification, and being willing to stand on the top of the roof hoiking great lengths of bendy SS tubing around (well, trained man and a gopher for half a day). This gives you around £700 + VAT So £840?
Not as bad as a new flue from self supporting twin wall SS.
So given market forces and the general risk factor of climbing around on the roof I would guess £750-£1,000 for an install depending on demographics.
Those who charge for building related work can probably cost this more closely, but a ball park figure of £1,000 does not seem too far off.
Cheers
Dave R
Haha, yes. Not exactly an unknown thing where the installer is an untrained, inexperienced muppet.
However difficult to spot from the outside of the chimney as there are bricks and some render in the way. Just a pointer that 1950s chimneys may not be fully resistant to tars and stuff.
In message , Grimly Curmudgeon writes
There is a tiny arrow on the spiral wound systems:-)
Dave Liquorice posted
Or both. I notified building control & sent them the fireplace plans along with those for a load of other work I am having done in the house. They replied "that looks fine but please supply a certificate when the work is completed."
Not sure what I am paying BR fees for there.
You are paying them to oversee the work to ensure it complies with BR. If you want you can ask them to inspect things like stove installations and test and test and certify them (at a price) or pay a third party (HETAS installer) to test and certify.
Much the same with electrics - get a sparky to test and certify or pay building control to do the same. The cost of this is extra to the basic BR fee.
You sure? I thought that it had been ruled that for, electrics at least, the BR fee included the cost of any inspection/certification that was required for compliance.
The fact that the BCO's aren't qualified to do the tests/certification thus need to employ some one who is is their problem not yours and they aren't allowed to pass that cost on.
ICBW...
Nice if you are right. though ::-)
Harry Davis wrote in news:XnsA11D7D604B382harrydavis@88.198.244.100:
Thanks to all who've replied on this. Apologies for being a grumpy old sod.
In some houses, open fires and ranges have been used in chimneys for a very long time, and so long as chimneys are swept regularly, I don't think lined flues are necessary. Nobody has proved to me that the effluents or temperature are so different nowadays that using a chimney the old way is too dangerous.
However, I've actually decided to use lined flues with the two installations I'll be doing! This is mainly because
a) most aspects of the job, including getting on the roof with a big wiggly thing and stuffing it down the chimney, seem as though they'll be great fun, and
b) I won't say no to the better appreciation of the physics of the house that I'll get.
:-)
I also intend to follow Document J, mainly because I might as well.
Cheers,
Harry
PS In the Outer Hebrides, a lot of people used to live in blackhouses - single-skin thick-walled stone houses with turf roofs and open peat- burning fires in the middle of the roof, with no chimney. The smoke from the fires seeped through the roof and blackened it - hence the name for this kind of house. No recorded cases of death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Yes OK they must have been draughty, but still...
Harry Davis wrote in news:XnsA11D7D604B382harrydavis@88.198.244.100:
Thanks to all who've replied on this. Apologies for being a grumpy old sod.
In some houses, open fires and ranges have been used in chimneys for a very long time, and so long as chimneys are swept regularly, I don't think lined flues are necessary. Nobody has proved to me that the effluents or temperature are so different nowadays that using a chimney the old way is too dangerous.
However, I've actually decided to use lined flues with the two installations I'll be doing! This is mainly because
a) most aspects of the job, including getting on the roof with a big wiggly thing and stuffing it down the chimney, seem as though they'll be great fun, and
b) I won't say no to the better appreciation of the physics of the house that I'll get.
:-)
I also intend to follow Document J, mainly because I might as well.
Cheers,
Harry
PS In the Outer Hebrides, a lot of people used to live in blackhouses - single-skin thick-walled stone houses with turf roofs and open peat- burning fires in the middle of the roof, with no chimney. The smoke from the fires seeped through the roof and blackened it - hence the name for this kind of house. No recorded cases of death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Yes OK they must have been draughty, but still...
In message , Harry Davis writes
I think the professionals prefer to *pull* it up. ISTR there is a cone available which grips/is clamped to the flue liner.
I stuffed mine down from the top because there was a severe *knee* in my chimney, just up from the fire opening, and I needed to fit insulation tubes. The insulation would have made the flue too rigid to feed up from the bottom.
I used scaffolders to erect a working platform as I needed to close off and ventilate one flue as well as flaunching the new, and various pointing repairs to a third.
H,
Harry Davis wrote in news:XnsA1265AEA6177Dharrydavis@88.198.244.100:
Two mistakes in what I wrote here!
I meant to type:
"open peat-burning fires in the middle of the floor"
not
"open peat-burning fires in the middle of the roof".
And I was forgetting that the walls weren't actually single-skin. They were double-skin: two layers of stone, with the cavity filled with soil.
A few people I know in their 70s and 80s were born in blackhouses, and I think the last continuously-inhabited non-renovated one was lived in until the 1970s, possibly the 1980s, on Benbecula.
They must have had a very 'iron age' feel. Great stuff. The ruins of very many are still standing, often with sheep grazing on top of what used to be the soil-filled cavities.
Harry
Some I've seen, were filled with rubble, rather than soil.
Not sure I'd want ten metres or so of flue liner loose in the house, it's not overly well behaved stuff. It's also not that strong in tension and may rip apart into a long narrow strip of folded stainless steel. Don't forget by the time you have it too the top you are lifting the entire weight of the liner plus any resistance on that top section join. Feeding down so gravity is working for you not against and a cone and rope to guide it around bends is the way to do it IMHO.
Just be careful that you support it well as it comes up the outside of the stack and bends over to go down into the chimney, it's easy to kink. As our installer did, which then peeled apart at the kink. New length of liner required... It's probably at three person job really, one at the bottom to gently pull the rope to aim the cone (if required), one at the top guiding into the chimney and another at the top supporting/feeding to the other.
Again a proper scaffold working platfrom is the way to go particulary if you are reflaunching the stack etc not using a pot hanger for the liner.
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