Idle thoughts

Yesterday, we came across an ornamental gas fire, a version of the the fire we have at home in Epsom. This one is got up as one of those free-standing wood burners and is standing in a fake fire place. There is what appears to be a gas intake, but no flue, no chimney that I can see.

Now when our fake fire was put in, the installation engineer made quite a performance about the chimney and made us get it swept before he got started. This for what amounted to a kilowatt of gas fire.

And there there are all the gas cookers I have known, few of which had any kind of chimney. And the ones that did were in holiday cottages, where we have had gas cookers with hoods above.

And then there were the water heaters of my childhood, which we called Geysers, probably a brand name. I don't remember chimneys but that is a possibility.

And, last but not least, the Aladdin paraffin heaters of our early married life, which generated a great deal of condensation and certainly did not have chimneys. We were still using ours - we had two of them - when we first moved to Epsom, we still had a shop up the road which sold the paraffin, but all long gone now. Lots of them on eBay this (Sunday) morning, so perhaps they have become a heritage item, a collectible.

Clearly time to ask Gemini about the regs here.

And in short order I learn that there are indeed lots of them, lots more than in the bad old days of the 1950s when I grew up. A lot of them being geared to the size of the room and the power of the appliance. With part of the policing of these regulations being all the documentation that you need these days when you sell property. And another part being the considerable powers of visiting gas men to shut you down - powers that we have, from time to time, bumped into.

He also told me that an Aladdin fire might pump out up half to a pint of water an hour. A pint for every pint of fuel. I remember to this day the mould growing on the wallpaper behind the brown wood wardrobe in a bed sitting room that we occupied for a while in the early 1970s.