Wood burner hazards

My last one was about €90 - which was the going rate in the Morbihan (Nov 2022)

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I expect this will be like PAT testing in the UK - anyone can buy electrical safety stickers on Amazon and self-certify their extension leads and other portable electrical gadgets - which is perfectly legal - but if a device starts a fire then there may be questions asked by the insurers as to who did the “testing”.

I self-certify equipment I take to wedding fairs or trade shows such as mains extension leads, my laptop and TV etc - but I do make sure these are fairly new, are stored where they won’t get damaged by nibbling creatures or other hazards such as water, and they get replaced if there is any chance they have got damaged (such as the time I ran over an electrical extension reel with a car in our garage. :smiley: )

I see no point in paying an electrician to tell me that a TV set I bought two months ago is electrically safe.

If you choose to live in more affluent parts of France, what can I say? :wink:

If rural Brittany is affluent I don’t want to go anywhere near the deprived areas. :thinking:

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BIL tops the poll at €135 then and must be very affluent Tours. Of course that may have been the English price.

if anyone has the time… the actual nitty-gritty in French makes interesting reading…
I’ll forage again later and find the bit I noticed earlier about fireplaces… unless someone finds it first :wink:

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I thought it was filling up with wealthy Parisian second home owners…

121€ was th cost of our sweep last summer. No cameras or anything fancy on offer by the sweep. We have a wood pellet burner which is our sole use of the chimney.

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And pellet burners running correctly wont cause a flue issue. Far to clean a burn.

Was that solely for cleaning the chimney, or did it include cleaning the poelle’s various innards?

Random thought - if you do a happy jig after you’ve had your chimney swept, does that make you a poêle-danseur? :smiley:

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No it makes you a Dick
Van dyke :sleeping:

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It included the poêles innards…

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Thanks - hope you’re oop north and that I can get it done for much less in the Aveyron - from previous posts on the thread, we seem to have the cheapest chimney sweeps.

Just booting this one up again. On this trip I bought all my air quality monitors with me and positioned them at various points around the house. Whereas before I had the monitor beside me on the sofa and readings were very low. I postioned another about 1 metre infront of the wood burner and up near the ceiling on a high beam. Opening the door of the wood burner slowly means a peak of PM2.5 particles at around 30 microgrames per m3 which dissipates in under 2 minutes back to the usual 0-4 ug/m3.
Opening it a bit quicker however will easily hit 130 ug/m3 and take 5 mins to fall back to the usual. If there is a log near the door of the fire it releases a small cloud and my monitor tops out at 500 ug/m3! That can take 10 mins to fall back but obviously that cloud of PM2.5 gradually falls but not usually to the point that someone sitting on the sofa would injest more than 30 ug/m3 which is still low. The monitor in the bedroom above however had a measure of 15 ug/m3 for many hours finaly falling back to 3 ug/m3 so whilst asleep people could still be breathing this in. My neighbour lights his fire which like most smokes until up to temperature. I tested the loud that was blowing in my direction but 50m away and the measurement even at that distance was 165 ug/m3.

I will be testing the relatives wood burners and lounges over the next couple of weeks as they said it was a long cold winter and they were burning most of the time and have sore throats they are having difficulty shifting.

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I open up the airflow before opening the door… the extra draught makes it blaze more and thus avoids any smoke/bits coming into the room when I stoke the fire or simply rearrange the burning logs…

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You really should get out more :wink:

… and breathe less wood smoke…?

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Do they “air” the rooms every day…

even when it’s cold, we wrap up and fling windows open… to get the lovely fresh air inside… brrrr… 10 minutes is enough, but I leave 'em open a lot longer (on the sunny side) if we get the chance. :wink: :wink:

whatever… I do hope they feel better soon… :crossed_fingers:

I popped up on the roof yesterday and fitted a different cowl to the chminey to improve the draw. I can report much improvement with barely any smoke entering the room now. I even used the door of the fire to waft open and shut with minimal smoke into the room which dissipated within a minute or two.

The relly’s do open doors and windows when its not raining as they to like the fresh air to blow through which it does quickly as they are at the top of the hill. They are considering purchasing a newer clean burning fire though.

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