The Real Thing

I have just finished putting in a Clearview wood burning stove for a customer. Lining the flue is a dirty job because it must be thoroughly swept first to stop the residual soot from corroding the new stainless steel liner. I bought the stainless steel liner from fluesystems.com. It is sold by the metre so the first thing is to make sure you buy enough. You aren't supposed to join lengths.

A lot of builders shove stainless steel liners in and, on the face of it there doesn't seem much that can go wrong. But it pays to read the small print. Stamped in tiny letters (and I mean tiny) on the flue is the word 'up' and an arrow. This is easy to miss but it is important. The double skin flue is wound in a spiral and the inner stainless steel spiral has a smooth edge and an exposed edge. Imagine wrapping tape around a pipe. If you brush your hand one way you catch the exposed edges,if you rub it the other way you are going with the flow and the exposed edges sit flat. If condensation or tar starts to run down the inside of the flue it needs to run across a smooth surface to prevent the tar catching in the joins. If the liner is the wrong way up, the tar will catch in all the tiny ridges and the chimney will need sweeping more often, perhaps twice a year. If it isn't swept, the liner will eventually catch fire and that may well be the end of the liner. A stainless steel flexible liner may withstand one chimney fire but probably not two.

Personally I prefer solid sections of pumice liner which are far more robust, but fitting these is in anything but a straight chimney is a much bigger job. You have to cut out the brickwork at the bends and it's difficult not to make a mess. In an occupied house it isn't worth the upheaval.

As I put the finishing touches to the slate hearth the householder was itching to light the stove and the kids came down to sit by their first real fire. They were delighted with it and in my experience of having a wood burner of some kind for 30 years that delight doesn't stop when you become an adult. There are few building jobs I do that result in such an enthusiastic response from the customer. I can fully understand why many people think that a home is not a home without a real fire, even though they may forgo the pleasure to save themselves the work and mess.

Personally I would be very reluctant to live in a home without a fire and a solid fuel stove is the most convenient and efficient real fire there is. It hardly ever needs to be cleared of ash and the fire is contained and controllable. But it isn't all about the heat. There is a life there, a whole cycle of expectation and development building up from the first match lighting the paper and kindling right up to the roaring flames and then dying down again. I have heard people say that they light a fire for company. That is a strange concept but I know what they mean.

You just don't get that with a gas fuel effect fire. They are completely predictable. You turn them on and they burn at the same rate until you turn them down or off. Like most simulations it holds out all the promise of the real thing but delivers nothing of the sort.

The other aspect that is missing is cutting the wood. There can be no better workout on a winter's day than a couple of hours spent chopping wood and rather than pointless running on a tread mill or pumping weights it is productive end result. To see my wood store with a nice neat log pile tucked away to dry gladdens my heart. If you feel sluggish and the winter days are dragging, chopping wood in the open air is the cure. There us more than a touch of Zen in the process. To be successful in the art of chopping, you have to perfect a firm, but not frantic, rhythm. You also need concentration (what poeple now call focus). If you don't envisage the axe going all the way through then it is likely to get stuck. Visualise success and the wood will split neatly in two. I believe that golfers say the same thing about their swing. The work doesn't end when you hit the ball.

If you like the sound of this wood chopping malarky but don't have a wood burner fear not, you can chop for me (think of me as your personal fitness trainer) and while I sit in front of my fire you can enjoy the warm feeling of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.

Free for all

I had a call today from a young lady who told me she was from Crime Research UK.
Apparently she was carrying out 'research' into crime in my area and as a reward for answering questions such as 'Are you worried about home security and crime?" they would offer me a security systems with 'free' fitting.

I put it to her that she was not really researching but selling. "You aren't a researcher at all" I said.
"I am" she replied and such was her indignation that it occurred to me that she might actually believe it herself. They say that to be a good salesman you have to believe. I wonder if the same applies to a researcher.

To tell you the truth I would have given her slightly more air time if she hadn't got that word 'free' in quite so quickly. I hate it when people tell me something is free. Buy one get one free puts me right off. Just give me the free one.

Why would anyone give something away let alone employ people to do it? They only have to stack the goodies up outside any commuter railway station in the country and they will be gone in no time. Iv'e seen them do it with packets of cereal at Victoria Station. People fall over eachother to grab one, people even walk around the stand twice to get another one.

It should be even easier to give money away but apparently it isn't. Some weeks ago I got a letter telling me that I had been randomly selected by computer and I have won 56 million pounds sterling. Won 56 million pounds in a competition I didn't even enter. The only explanation is that the prize is worthless. There was a time when the pound was worth something and they could have stood there in the street handing cash out but then the pound went pop and now it seems there is all this worthless paper piling up somewhere taking up valuable space. So someone came up with the idea of giving it away in huge quantities. "Lets not mess around, lets give it to people in decent quantities. All well and good but letting a computer decide who gets it is not a good idea. I'm not a deserving cause, I don't even like shopping.

All I had to do was send them a mere £20.00 registration fee and they would then be able to place the money in my bank account after I had, of course, given them my bank details.
In the same delivery, we had another letter in an identical envelope addressed to the bloke over the road. I am ashamed to say that it crossed my mind to claim his 56 million as well (see how easily money makes you greedy) but I did the honourable thing and posted the envelope through his door.
That was several weeks ago and he is still living there in that nice, but modest, house driving a four year old hatch back and he hasn't so much as had a party.

Perhaps his randomly selected win was for a lesser sum, nowhere near the 56 million that I won when I can be bothered to cash it in. I don't dare ask him in case he thinks I'm gloating. See what money does to you.I'm now greedy and paranoid.

Underfloor heating

I overheard someone moaning about the running costs of underfloor heating and I couldn’t resist chipping in. “Underfloor heating is generally cheaper to run than radiators because it uses lower temperatures so, if you set it up correctly, the boiler will stay in the condensing mode and deliver efficiencies in excess of 90%.” I said or words to that effect.
“Well I have switched mine off after I got an electricity bill for over one thousand pounds. My central heating never cost me anything like that.” replied the man.

That word ‘electric’ changed everything. In the UK electric underfloor heating is usually a tile warm up system that is used in kitchens and bathrooms. It is not the same as warm water underfloor heating but is sometimes miss sold as a total heating system. It works in kitchens and bathrooms because it responds quickly to warm the tiles so you set the timer for an hour or two in the morning and the same in the evening. It turned out that his builder had installed electric underfloor heating under the entire ground floor. This was not a new build or an extension so I wondered what sort of insulation they had used. After a little bit of questioning it turned out that the builders had simply stuck the underfloor heating mesh down on the existing screed. No wonder they didn’t go for warm water. To make matters worse this house was thirty years old so was very unlikely to have any insulation on the ground floor. The heating was simply warming up that great mass of concrete and disspaeraing into the ground. A very small part of it was coming up through the tiles and wooden flooring.

I asked him whether he or they had ever mentioned insulation and he told me that he had but they told him “Heat rises”. They were obviously paying attention during their school physics class but may have dozed off during the bit where the teacher said heat will always move from hot to cold and never the other way. In other words until the slab of concrete reaches the same temperature as the tiles the tendency will be for the heat to travel at a faster rate down into that concrete than up into the tiles.

“So that means I need to hack up the entire ground floor to out down insulation?” said the man.

I gathered it was more of a statement than a question.

"The other alternative is to not have under floor heating" I said which is effectively what he has now decided.

“That can’t be right” He said.
“What can’t be right?”
“Me not being able to have underfloor heating, it is wrong, there should be a way.”
“There is” I replied
“What is it?” he asked
“Insulation”

Rising damp?

I got a call from a friend of a friend who had been suffering from persistent rising damp. He has spent a fortune on various remedies but it still it came back. The flat was only twelve years old so it sounded to me as if the damp proof course had been breached in some way. The usual reason would be having a path or patio laid to close to the dpc height.
When I arrived at the flat I was somewhat surprised to find that it was on the third floor. I have seen a lot of cases of rising damp in my time but never has it risen above 1 metre. I was ready to rule it out but when I got into the flat I could see all the familiar signs of rising damp. Large patches of bubbling plaster up to a height of around 900mm. Some patches were on internal dividing walls and some patches were on the outside walls or party walls to neighbouring flats. None of the other flats in the block had shown any signs of rising damp.

The patches seemed to coincide with radiators and my immediate thought was that the central heating system was leaking. “I’ve had it checked” he said.
I subsequently found out that this problem had been going on for two years and a surveyor had originally diagnosed a central heating leak some time ago. The only problem with that diagnosis was that the system showed no pressure loss. This could of course have been because it was being slowly topped up by the filling loop so I disconnected the loop just to make sure and I told the householder to keep an eye on the pressure gauge. A week later there had been no sign of a pressure drop.
“I think we can rule out the heating” I said .
“Yes that it what the plumber told me” he replied.
The householder then told me that he had a damp specialist company in around a year ago who had re-plastered the walls with a waterproof render. This is treating the symptom not the cause and judging by the bubbles and flaking plaster it hadn’t even done that. All that work and disruption hadn’t made the slightest difference.

It occurred to me that if the pipes feeding the radiators started in the hall cupboard where the boiler was and spread out like tentacles through plastic duct work set in the floor screed it was just possible that the duct work was also shared by another pipe which was leaking into the duct. The obvious place to start was in the cupboard. Unfortunately there was no sign of any duct work in the airing cupboard but I found that the pipes went through the wall and down under the bath. The bath panel was tiled in with no visible means of removal and that could have been the reason why nobody had pursued this line of enquiry.

When I eventually managed to remove the panel I could see immediately that the flexible overflow pipe had fallen off at the top end and it was dangling in the plastic floor duct. This meant that a good percentage of the water from the bath or shower was leaking into the ducts on a daily basis and was then being channelled around the house by a system of what were effectively small canals. The canals came to an abrupt end at the walls which not surprisingly were very damp.

I put the hose back on the spigot and secured it there with a Jubilee clip. The total cost of the repair 26 pence.