The old stove was in reasonable condition but had far too large an output for the room. The previous owner of the property had fitted a new stone tiled hearth around the feet of the stove rather than removing the stove and laying the tiles underneath the feet.

The original flue pipe was fitted through a chimney closure plate with no seals and connected the stove to the original masonry chimney. Here the flue pipe has been removed and you can see a black textured deposit above the closure plate with a greyish deposit on top. This is a soot, debris and ash build up of around 150mm in depth. The chimney is approximately 500mm x 300mm here and this amount of debris is a fire risk. There was no means of removing this or effectively cleaning the chimney without removing the stove completely, not something you should need to do every year.

With the old stove removed there were now holes in the hearth tiles where they had been fitted around the legs of the stove. This will be repaired to match with spare pieces of the tiles left from when the hearth was laid.

Access to the top of the chimney is with a cherry picker as the roof is fragile Collyweston slate and scaffolding is likely to damage this. We had previously discussed the condition of the chimney with our clients as it was obvious from the ground that repairs would be necessary.

The top two courses of brickwork including the midfeathers are removed, the bricks are cleaned and rebuilt. Four new chimney pots are then fitted, three of the chimneys serve currently unused fires but as there are still fireplaces associated with two of the chimneys our clients felt the option to use them in the future was important. We therefore fitted four new chimney pots, the three unused chimneys have 300mm pots with removable ventilated caps and the chimney serving the stove has a taller pot to prevent fumes from blowing directly into the holes on the vent caps on the other chimneys.

The new Scan-Anderson 4-5 stove is installed and is test fired before handing over to our clients.