An unusual item literally for this weeks blog, something found up a flue which really shouldn’t have been there! The customer had asked me in to sweep the lined flue to her old Rayburn Range at a property in Radwinter. The customer reported that despite having had the appliance swept religiously for many years it had not been working as efficiently as it had done for a number of years. There was nothing too unusual about the installation, a couple of 45 degree turns in the flue, sweeping access from the appliance and a standard cowl on the top of the flue.

I swept the flue using 8mm power sweeping click rods and small scrubber head and retrieved from the flue the small brush pictured, along with a quantity of sooty debris. A simple type 2 smoke test demonstrated that the flue was now drawing strongly. I suppose to add insult to injury the removed brush was only half the diameter of the flue pipe and therefore would never have been suitable for cleaning the flue effectively. I’m guessing that it had become stuck in one of the turns or the cowl and that the power sweeping head was powerful enough to dislodge it. The dishonest tradesman, I won’t grace him with the title sweep, clearly didn’t tell the customer that he had lost a brush up the flue and made no significant attempt to retrieve it!

The customer told me that one of her previous sweeps had been an old man who always struggled to sweep the Rayburn and never issued her with a Sweeping Certificate! She said that she stopped using him after she came into the kitchen one hot summers day when he was sweeping the Rayburn and found him sweating, stripped to the waist and blaspheming.

I suppose the moral of the story is to always use a Certified Sweep to do any sweeping work!