hendriQ

Sorry that is a typo. My main contractor fitted them, with supervision from my architect (who designed this crazy scheme).

cutting of two large format 3200 x 160 x 6mm marrazzi tiles into the pieces shown above - £500 plus VAT packaging and delivering all pieces (and leftovers) £100 plus VAT total = £720 inc VAT.

No redesign. No need.

Silly?

I love being mad sometimes

Also a doubter. Come on people, you need to be more optimistic in life!

Nothing wrong with being mad, when it works.

Doubter numero 1

There were a lot of doubters on this thread. It couldn’t be done, they cried. I’m mad, they said. They were wrong: We changed the colour of the towel heater, but otherwise nailed the render spot on! Tile cutting company were excellent. Only mistake they made was that they forgot to label the pieces, which gave me an interesting game to play matching the adjacent tiles; took me a day to match them all up. Was a fun day, though required a lot of care; turns out that 2520 by 40 by 6mm porcelain is harder to slide around than the average puzzle piece. #focuseddetermination #nevergiveuponyourdreams

No, it goes straight up.

I see where you are coming from now. When the "fixer" attended in late Nov to diagnose the issue, he did get some cardboard and light it on fire to see if the flue drew. I can't remember if he went outside to look at whether the smoke came out the chimney. Is that the test he should have done?

Also, i'm no thermodynamics expert but is a partially blocked flue likely when the fire lights so easily and draws very well for a good 30 minutes before the issue developed. I also can't see what it would be blocked with. Brand new installation, with a flue pipe going all the way up to the top of the house.

I agree with this, save that both the original installer and the purported fixer were Hetas registered, so it doesn't sound like such a good accreditation.

I can do that, but as I'm now in a dispute with the company (i sent them a threatening letter by fax a few minutes ago - i know who still has fax, but luckily they do) and rather not post it here as they have a copy of the video and they'll be able to put 2 and 2 together. Anyway, not much to see other than grey smoke billowing out of a tiny gap between two pieces of metal.

Apparently I’m exceeding the file size limit.

Yes, it shows smoke coming out from the same place as last time. I guess my options are to claim against my credit card company under section 75 of the ConsumerCredit legislation which - checked - I am still well within time to do, or try to engage with HETAS to get to the bottom of what the cause is, or speak to the Stove manufacturer or give the supplier and installer yet another chance. I am loathe to do the last option, unless there is a defect in the stove itself they just smack of incompetence.

So by way of update, the stove was purportedly fixed in early December. The guy applied some fire cement, gave me instructions on how to cure it and then told me “it would definitely be fine now”. Well we ran the stove at least once a week over the last 5 weeks or so, all good. Then tonight it happened AGAIN. I’m fuming. I paid by credit card so solid be relatively straightforward to get all my money back, although I need to check as the transaction was over a year ago. If not I will sue . Is my reaction a reasonable one?

Thanks for everyone's comments. I made the mistake of relying on recommendations from effectively people i didn't know for scroundel 1 and 2. But for the third one, the recommendation came from a trusted source and the company's accounts on companies house looked ok. It would be helpful to understand how people recommend I find a fourth joiner and how I should do appropriate due diligence. My view on websites like trust a trader.com is that it is easy to manipulate by its members because you only seemed to get asked to review a trader when the job goes well. This company that has let me down most recently was member of various livery companies and guilds, so searching on their databases doesn't really inspire me with confidence either, but perhaps that is a bit irrational on my part. No reason why one member's foibles should affect another's. It's all thoroughly depressing. If i were to behave like this with my clients I would get into a lot of trouble with my boss and possibly even with my regulator. Life can be really sh!t sometimes.

I think I may be at my wits end. After spending a couple of £k on design fees, we commissioned our joinery in 2021. The joiner was given 20 pages of detailed design drawings, with all measurements and the contract was based on those drawings. That joiner ripped us off, took our 50% deposit and never did anything for us. We then split the joinery project into 7 sub-projects and commissioned three of those sub-projects with a new joiner, with the promise we would do the rest of it with him if he did a good job. He did the first project, almost finished it and then disappeared. Haven't heard from him in over 4 months. We then decided to stop going with the cheapest options and commissioned a company that had been recommended by a friend. The sacrifice here was that this company was very expensive, almost double some of the other quotes we'd received, but we thought "you pay for what you get". This company did the first piece for us and it came out really well. We were happy with it and asked if they could do more for us. They were initially reluctant but then agreed to do a bookcase and some wardrobes and wall cladding. Although that was all fairly big scale stuff, it wasn't any harder than the first project they did for us, which was a massive piece of furniture in its own right. So all they were signing up for really was more of the same. As before, we paid their 50% deposit and have been working with them over the last month or so to finalise matters and they have done a site survey and produced some construction drawings based on our designer's drawings. At their request they came back for a second site survey as apparently they missed some measurements the first time. It's all been quite professional and I've been impressed by all the laser equipment they have to take accurate measurements and levels and the detail on their drawings (similar to the detail on our designer's drawings, but with a few changes to overcome the reality of actually constructing it). Yesterday, the company contacts me and this woman tells me it's too difficult a project for them and they are going to pull out and return the "majority" of my deposit. I tried to explain to her that they couldn't do this and that they needed to stick to the agreement we'd come to, but it was little use. No explanation as to how much of my deposit (which is over £10k) I'm going to get back. But it's a horrible position to be in as we'd been in discussions with this company for a few months, they put pressure on us to pay a deposit to fix material prices, and now we're back to square one, possibly losing some of our deposit. Today I decided to write a nice email basically saying that there must be some misunderstanding and begging them not to pull out and suggesting ways we could try to resolve the position. Just really odd behaviour to have gone from really professional to really unprofessional so quickly and for no reason. I just don't understand why I've been so unlucky. Granted the project is ambitious, but why do people sign up to stuff if they think they can't do it. If anybody has any recommendations for what will now be our FOURTH joiner, please PM me as I would really appreciate it.

Installer came. Turns out the previous installer did not use fire cement to seal the join between the stove and the stove pipe. Instead he used some fire rope. The second installer said that it wasn't best-practice to seal stuff with fire rope - he said fire rope is only really good in limited situations and this wasn't one of them. simply incredible.

Installer coming tomorrow. Let's see what they say... Still pretty shocked this was signed off as safe, but I guess nothing is full-proof in life.

You are probably right. Installer is coming back to fix. One question I will ask him is how can I be assured that all the other joints in the 9m or so flue above are airtight. This has just taken out all the enjoyment of using the fire. I can’t see myself ever having the confidence of lighting the stove and knowing that I’m not going to poison my son, given the flue goes through his bedroom.

It’s a fairly expensive Dutch stove. Photo below, with a sharp focus on the flue paint blistering, which is a couple of mm above the join where it leaked

It's a twin skin flue. But the leak came out of the join between the stove itself and the twin skin flue and I don't think that bit of the stove is twin skin as it is significantly narrower in diameter. There is therefore an adaptor that transitions the narrower part to the wider twi skin flue, and the leak came out of the join between the adaptor and the stove.

The flue was drawing well. I don't think it's a problem with the flue being blocked. There should be no gaps in the joins that would allow hot smoke to pass through.