Power chimney sweeping

The price of these appears to have dropped markedly so i bought an ebay set. The difficulty here is that the flue port on my main woodburner was a bitch to get the old fashioned bristle brush in and out of but worse there is some sort of ledge a short distance up that necessitated an arm in the flue port and lots of cursing and fiddling to get the brush back down the last bit.

All that becomes easy with a brush designed to be spun and with flexible plastic strands. The only issue I had (yesterday) was that the new rods are held together with a sprung stud that has to be a reasonably tight tension and was very difficult to hold a tool to depress that stud while trying to hold and twist both rods apart... made harder by the fact that there ends up being torsional tension in the mess of rods. Also with no friction holding the brush head up the flue then a tendency for the whole mess of brush and rods to try and snake back down while coupling/uncoupling the rods.

I think the simplest solution to this will be a thumb thimble with a stud on it..perhaps as simple as a band of, say, copper with a stud, curved to fit around thumb so you can grip a rod in each hand and depress that coupling.

Apart from that the amount of debris recovered was definately more than with conventional brushing and getting it in and out of the flue port was easy. We didn't use the fire that much last year but i collected 2 henry-type vacuum bags full of sweepings this time.

edited to add that i sweep it every 3 mths of use but get lazy at the end of fire season  and leave it to be brushed before the next season starts.

pgk

Edited By pgk pgk on 09/09/2020 10:00:05

Sounds like a job that needs to be followed by a shower When I lived in Germany the sweep worked from the top down, the houses all had a coke fired boiler in the basement and the soot was swept down into the boiler. The sweep would walk along the ridge to do both houses without moving his ladder. The coke delivery was great entertainment for a small boy. Half of the boiler room was the coke store which could take about 5m3 of coke, the partition had removable boards to access the coke as you used it up and if you forgot to replace them when the delivery arrived you would have coke everywhere. The delivery was by a lorry with a conveyor from the hoppers and a set of chutes were arranged across the front lawn to the basement flap, delivery was done in a few minutes including the chute setup. The other mistake was to not remember to close all the doors to the basement unless you like dusting. Most of the basement flaps were left unlocked so being a handy small boy I was sent down the chute to undo the front door of people who were locked out, great fun as normally sliding down the chute did not go down well with mother as you did get filthy.

Mike

The room has a tiled floor and apart from a few stray bits of 'clinker' it remained clean. It take a litlle practice. My first attempt some years ago incurred the wrath of OH.

When i was a lad we had an anthracite grain fired boiler. The coal store was via back door lobby again with boards that slotted into grooves for height. In-fill was via an outside slid board 'window' and the coal lorry pulled up at the d of the back path and carried sackfulls down. Coalie wore a flat cap with a drop cloth attached that covered the back of his head and shoulders. 4.5 tons did us for the year. One coke bucket (those tall conical jobbies) filled the boiler hopper and the rest was self feeding. Dad used to use tongs and remove a single large fused piece of slag every morning.

The woodburner is a messy beast - runs a back boiler and can warm the rads. To get them hot though the thing has to go full-chat and really gets through timber at that rate. I can easily burn through a compact tractors loader bucket-full a day and the dust involved is a PITA. We tend to only use it when it's just chilly or when it's so cold that the oil-fired Rayburn is struggling and the burner tops up warmth. I have almost unlimited timber on my land but the carting and cutting and splitting takes a toll too.

pgk

I have come across some scary home brewed machines on YouTube for splitting logs, in the videos people appear to a complete set of fingers but it must be just a matter of time when they will need to count in base 9 or less.

Mike

My biggest mistake was setting up the workshop vacuum to suck up the falling dust. A bag failure meant all I did was pump it into the room!

Future policy was a duck-taped sheet with the rods poked through and letting it all settle before removing the sheet.

Neil

My last house had a wood burner & the wife & I (well she did!!) decided the chimney needed cleaning. As a builder I regularly had to clean chimneys of refurbished houses so had a brush. To rod drains I had a 100M length of black underground plastic water pipe to which I had fitted a screw fitting for a plunger. This also fitted the brush.

So after suitable covering furniture, the wife & I started sweeping. My house had a flue with a number of turns & was 3 storeys high so needed a lot of shoving. It also needed a lot of pushing to get the brush up the flue. As we all know ,difficult jobs call for lots of swearing between couples.

After a while sweat was pouring off us & there was a knock at the front door.

" Oh! who the b..y hell is that" " Tell them to F off we are busy " etc etc

"ignore it". "You go," " No you go"

Eventually my wife swore, (at me & chimneys in general!!) removed overalls & went to front door

To be met by a chimney sweep brush on the end of a plastic hose.banging on the door. We had not realised that we had shoved so much that the thing had gone up the chimney & back down the outside again !! Being off a roll it curved back in towards the door & was swinging in the wind with the wooden centre hitting the wooden door

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 09/09/2020 15:34:43

Sounds like you needed a spotter to call when the brush appeared how much more would you have shoved up the chimney if it hadn’t knocked on the door?

Mike

I have somwhere a book written by a sapper just after the first world war. Someone invented a technique of jacking a tube through the clay under the opposing trenches quickly the night before an attack and pushing an explosive charge down it. As it was jacked forward the spoil inside the tube was removed with drain rods then a sweep's brush. The book tells of an operation one moonless night when much laughter was heard from the trenches opposite. Dawn revealed the tube projecting 30 ft in the air in no man's land with a sweep's brush waggling around out of the top.

Edited By Bazyle on 09/09/2020 16:09:43

I used to sweep our chimney with drain rods and a brush and always incurred the wrath of the wife because of the mess that I created. When we graduated from an open fire to a woodburner I was banned from sweeping the flue and we now employ a chimney sweep who has all the correct gear, and I must say he is 100% cleaner than me, which pleases the wife. I must admit he sometimes struggles with getting the sequence right for reassembling the pieces of the woodburner that have to be dismantled for access to the flue, secretly I am glad I no longer have to sweep the chimney, there are much more appropriate tasks that I can be doing at my time of life.
Dave W