Household Hints & Help

I've been a member since 2009, I just prefer to bite my tongue and read and digest much of the time! Nice to meet you, too.

This was all fresh in my mind as I've just cleaned our chimney in the way I described, hence the screed, and some of the warnings. We'd been sweeping it regularly for years with the traditional brush and poles. This never produced much soot, so we assumed the stove was burning reasonably cleanly, but I don't think it had ever been cleared properly since the house was built back in the 70s, so there was quite a build-up of creosote (not outlandish, but about an eighth of an inch or so - I suspect there may have been minor chimney fires in the past, which is certainly one way to clean a chimney, but definitely not recommended) and we'd had a fall of soot inside the stove recently, so alarm bells rang (not literal ones!).

In the absence of holly bushes, I understand a street urchin can do a fine job if you've a capacious chimney. With the holly bush method, they'd take up a small bush to the chimney top, attach it to a rope, drop the rope down the chimney, then haul away. I could see a few potential hazards with that method, and it must have been quite messy inside.