Welcome to the forum L J2, sorry to hear you are experiencing the same problems, I fully sympathise with you.! I will PM you some information when I get chance, no problemo.

There have been a few developments with my case recently but unfortunately I haven’t had time to update the thread. As you will see from my posts I have complained heavily to the chief executive of my Local Authority how the Environmental Health Department have dealt with the smoke problems and have now taken my complaint to the Local Government Ombudsmen. I spoke to the investigating officer at the LGO a couple of weeks ago and she said she wouldn’t be looking into my case as it had been dealt with. I said “whose dealt with it?” she said “******** District Council, they have looked into the problem and it has been sorted” I couldn’t believe my ears! I said “the smoke was and still remains life threatening to me and how can it be right that “******** District Council took eight weeks to get the smoke stopped when my neighbours first Boiler was illegal (No certification of conformity) and was not DEFRA exempt to burn wood as we live in a smoke control area” she replied quite bluntly “it`s been sorted and I`m not prepared to investigate it further”. I emailed the Investigating Officer and said I didn’t think it was right that my Local Authority are being allowed to be judge and jury. I received an email from her last week attaching a provisional review of my complaint which concludes that she is satisfied that my LA have followed their procedures. She has also said that there isn’t any evidence that a statutory nuisance exists and has been prejudicial to my health. It also appears that she has selected the sections from the Local Authorities correspondence that are beneficial to their defence! I have since emailed a section of my evidence including a couple of videos of the smoke and four letters from my respiratory consultant who has specifically blamed the smoke for the downturn in my breathing capabilities.

Regarding the recent smoke events, I entered into discussions with my neighbour about the smoke two weeks ago. He said he had received the letter from my solicitor and would be making enquiries into altering his chimney to help abate the smoke nuisance. I thought we had made a breakthrough and told my solicitor to postpone the court application. However, I spoke to my neighbour again last weekend and he said he had made enquiries about his chimney and said the contractors that carried out the installation said that it complied with building regs. My neighbour concluded the conversation by saying he wouldn’t be making any alteration to his chimney. I had two evenings of exposure to my neighbours smoke last week, one of which was bad enough to give me a nosebleed. I haven’t seen any further improvement with the smoke emissions as yet so It looks like I will be instructing my solicitor to carry on with the court proceedings.

I would advise you to read this thread from the beginning if you haven’t done already. The kind members of GBF have given me loads of help and advice and it`s well worth reading through. You are in the best place for help my friend, I can vouch for that.

Do you know if your neighbours have installed their stove themselves and do you live in a smoke control area?

Best wishes

Mikeee

Mikeee
Sorry to hear you are still having problems - but honestly I am not surprised. You say

Posted By: Mikeee5I entered into discussions with my neighbour about the smoke two weeks ago. He said he had received the letter from my solicitor and would be making enquiries into altering his chimney to help abate the smoke nuisance. I thought we had made a breakthrough and told my solicitor to postpone the court application. However, I spoke to my neighbour again last weekend and he said he had made enquiries about his chimney and said the contractors that carried out the installation said that it complied with building regs. My neighbour concluded the conversation by saying he wouldn’t be making any alteration to his chimney.

As I said on the 18th August
"The threat to take legal action rarely has much effect. Notification of commencement of proceedings from the court will often focus the mind and start actions to resolve the problem. Keep gathering the data and start the proceedings to have the nuisance stopped".

Keep at it.

The fact that the chimney has been installed to building regs means nothing and it is no guarantee that it will work in removing the pollutants from the area. The contractors might have done the installation to the building regs, and this probably lets them off the hook but there are many factors affecting the performance of a chimney that the regs can not / do not take into account

I do not understand how the “******** District Council could look int the problem and declare it 'sorted' without contacting you to discuss the matter before making such a declaration !!

I agree with Tony's comments.
Good luck with the continuation.

The method of using the stove or what type of fuel is used IMO will not stop the down wash from the chimney, which is the real problem. What fuel type or usage method might do, as Gavin says, is reduce some of the particulate output however at the moment I would suggest perversely that the more visible smoke the better, if you are trying to demonstrate the problem to officials and the world at large. There is also a danger of suggesting a solution, in that if Mikeee gets involved in finding a solution and makes a suggestion (like different fuel) then once the suggestion has been carried out and the request has been fulfilled further complaints become difficult.

You might want to point out that distances given in building regulations are set as being an absolute minimum standard, and NOT a maximum standard.

If their situation is resulting in the smoke not being dispersed upwards, then they legally need to go above and beyond the minimum measurements given in building regs to ensure that this is the case.

Whoever said this meets building regs clearly doesn't understand the regs properly, as the regs themselves make this perfectly clear, and anyone installing or operating a solid fuel device is legally obliged to comply with all the regulations NOT just the minimum distances specified.

1.1 Requirements J1 to J4 will be met if the building provisions for the safe accommodation of combustion appliances:

b. enable normal operation of appliances without the products of combustion becoming a hazard to health.

2.8 Flues should be high enough to ensure sufficient draught to clear the products of combustion. The height necessary for this will depend upon the type of the appliance, the height of the building, the type of flue, and the number of bends in it, and an assessment of local wind patterns.

However, a minimum flue height of 4.5m COULD be satisfactory IF the guidance in paragraphs 2.1-2.12 is adopted.
As an alternative approach, the calculations within BS EN 13384-1:2005 can be used as the basis for deciding whether a chimney design will provide sufficient draught.

It's clear from your particulates measurements that in this case that 1.1 b is not satisfied, because 2.8 isn't satisfied. No assessment of local wind patterns can have been carried out, and they've just relied entirely on the the guide distances given in 2.10-2.12 and diagram 17.

They have wrongly interpreted the word 'could' to mean 'will always' in 2.8, which is clearly not the way it was intended to be interpreted.

This therefore is an illegal installation. You would definitely win in court on this basis, and I'd think you would also be able to claim damages from the council for their failure to uphold their duty of care to you by wrongly applying the regulations when you complained.

I'd be happy to put this in writing for you. If need be, our consultancy includes a professor of combustion engineering who would happily wipe the floor with these muppets in court on this subject, who also runs an annual CPD biomass course where hundreds of HSE, council and fire brigade inspectors come to learn this stuff. I'll write a letter myself nor nothing, but if you wanted his name on it we'd need some level of fee for this (which you should be able to reclaim from the council if you take them to court).

This is so clear cut IMO that the council would fold and settle out of court as soon as they were presented with the expert opinion.

I work on the basis that most civil servant types are fairly clueless, and just know enough to blag their way through life and convince those who don't know better.

Occasionally I meet the exception to the rule, but it's not very often.

tbf, it's mostly not their fault, as constant cuts mean they no longer attend the sort of CPD courses they used to be sent on where they actually would have been taught this stuff, and they instead rely on Uni courses have been dumbed down to the point where a full MSc / MEng is needed to be about equivalent to a Bsc / Beng 15-20 years ago, and there actually is no equivalent of an old MEng / MSc course in terms of the average competence of those graduating.

Hi Mikeee5 Can you tell me if the air monitor is a good idea? And what size particulate should I get. Lots of things have been happening - cant say too much but I think you are blazing the trail. If you couls whisper might be able to compare notes.

I have uploaded a couple of photographs to help identify if the smoke that I am experiencing in and around my property from my neighbours chimney is being caused by down draught. As you will see from the photos, the chimney is within close proximity to my flat roof dormer and there are a number of high trees to the west of my property. I have also uploaded the pages from the stove manual regarding down draught as it gives reference to both suction caused by flat roofs and down draught caused by high objects. As mentioned in an earlier post, the chimney serving the new stove was previously used to vent a gas fired back boiler.

Mikeee5

Instruction manual for the wood burning stove.....

Roof pitch over 30 degree.....

Flat roof.....

Here is the aerial view.....

Its difficult to see an obvious cause for the problems from the pictures, although the trees may affect the chimney but they seem to be some distance away in the first photo but closer in the second photo.

Gavin_A's post of Oct 28th 2012 gives a good pointer on the building regs and basically says that the building regs require a chimney to work rather than be built to specific dimensions. IMO you should start proceedings for nuisance with the data on pollution that you have collected, using the building regs as quoted above to counter any claim that the chimney complies and leave the solution to the problem to the owner of the chimney once an order has been obtained.

As I understand it if someone continues to cause a statutory nusiance after they have been warned of the fact then they may leave themselves open to damages for negligence as well.

It's possible they may try and claim that the smoke they emit was reasonable and that most people would not have been troubled by it. However there is an "egg shell skull" principle that basically says you must take your victims as you find them. So I reckon your existing health issue should enable you to claim that in your case the threshold of what is "acceptable" should be lower then normal, especially if you have advised them of it.

I hate to say it, but is it all the extensions and outbuildings on your house causing problems to the normal airflow around your property? It seems to be 'developed' to the max. Perhaps your other neighbours are annoyed by all your extensions making the smoke worse for them as well?

Buildings can't cause smoke nuisance! Smoke causes that.