Coal / smoke stains on chimney breast

Lleucu

Good morning, bore da I am looking for some help with sorting out a large stone chimney breast.

We replaced a log burner with a new log burner and lined the chimney but there are traces of smoke damage on the chimney breast, I think the chimney may have been blocked and the smoke penetrated the stone and has left a horrible oily residue on the chimney breast.

Is there any safe chemical product to tackle it or will it need sanding?

There are also hard to remove soot deposits on the hearth (quarry tiles).

Any ideas most welcome

PS Damage is down to me, husband said dont use the old log burner but I went ahead with the above results.

muckybutt

Lleucu wrote: »

Good morning, bore da I am looking for some help with sorting out a large stone chimney breast.

We replaced a log burner with a new log burner and lined the chimney but there are traces of smoke damage on the chimney breast, I think the chimney may have been blocked and the smoke penetrated the stone and has left a horrible oily residue on the chimney breast.

Is there any safe chemical product to tackle it or will it need sanding?

There are also hard to remove soot deposits on the hearth (quarry tiles).

Any ideas most welcome

PS Damage is down to me, husband said dont use the old log burner but I went ahead with the above results.

Firstly smoke wont be causing the damage, the staining coming through will be the creosote or tar leeching through the morter / stonework, if it was painted then a good stain block paint would do or I have known customers to paste foil to their walls then paper over that, however yours being stone then theres not a lot you are going to be able to do with it, it will continue to leech through what ever you do to the stonework as its already inside the chimney.

I suspect the old fire was burning either on slumber a lot or was burning wet or damp wood, both of which are bad for creating tar / creosote build up, dont whatever you do burn damp wood on the new fire as it will block / choke the flue liner up in days if not weeks and they are a !!!!!! to get clean !

Soot spots ! I use the solvent based hand wipes more than anything, the ones called big wipes or something like that available from b n q, also good for getting rid of tar marks as well.

DogsBody

The 'traditional' remedy to stop tar-based leakage through the chinmey pointing is 'parging' (think that's the right word? Something like that, anyway) with a *ahem* 'cow based product';), then plastering over (lime, usually) - obviously if you have exposed stonework and want to keep it that way, this won't work for you

Is the staining to the actual stone or to the pointing in between? We have raked out and repointed our chimney breast (lime mortar) - it was pretty black and gooey before, now it is better but I think any tar residue still up the chimney may well leak through again in time (chimney is lined now so shouldn't be any more tar added).

Don't like to sandblast cos the lime is fairly soft and will take a bit of a battering (not to mention the dust! :eek:), but it's probably the most effective way of doing it?

Lleucu

Staining is to the actual stone and not the morter particularly it seems to have leached through from the chimney .. after writing my first post I wiped it with flash cleaning fluid and it was black and tarry ...

rheme

Try 'dabbing' the marks with surgical spirit. I removed soot marks out of a cream carpet using this method and it worked a dream. :j