Chimney flue location

Before we investigate the reasons behind chimney flue location survey, let us explain what exactly a chimney flue is.

A chimney flue is a passage or void through which exhaust gases from a fire, boiler, or other combustion device are vented to the outdoors. In historic buildings chimney flues were made   of bricks, many of them in a single skin brickwork.  

Modern houses in Britain (circa 1960) will typically have pre-cast flues, where flues are built from a concrete or clay blocks or prefabricated flues, which are steel metal pipes.

Typically, a chimney flue location survey is commissioned when you wish to demolish a wall to connect adjoining rooms or apartments, drill into or through the wall, or install a fire or other combustion device and be looking for a convenient route to expel the exhaust gasses. Disused chimney flues also make ideal routes for cables and pipes to travel through a building and may be used for this purpose.

In historical buildings, which have several fireplaces on each floor and complex network of flues, chimney flue tracing survey is vital before any maintenance work can take place.

Damage to an active chimney flue can cause toxic gasses to escape inside the building with serious health implications including death, so it is important to take adequate precautions.

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GPR is an entirely non-destructive and non-invasive technology (NDT), which only requires access to the surfaces of the walls to be surveyed (a prerequisite to the chimney flue mapping survey will be moving any obstructions such as furniture or paintings etc. as radar must be in direct contact with the wall).

A GPR survey to locate chimney flues will cause no damage to the building and there is no requirement to drill or use intrusive investigation methods.

For smaller projects a survey takes a day and for larger ones it typically is two or three days.

Because GPR is a low impact technique causing minimum disruption, a GPR chimney flue location survey can be conducted on buildings that are still in use or occupied.

Our experienced surveyors will attend site and perform a comprehensive survey of every wall to be investigated using an advanced handheld GPR equipment.

The GPR will be pushed in a series of scans across the surface of each of the walls (whilst remaining in direct contact with the wall), until full coverage has been achieved. GPR data will be collected and saved on site ready for office-based processing and interpretation.
Once in the office we import the information saved on-site into our specialized GPR post-processing software. Applying adequate filters in the GPR software allows us to visualize and interpret the GPR data. Once we locate and map the paths of the chimney flues through the walls, we can then produce a drawing. A short report will accompany the drawing.