I've found my set-pot

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone

I am in the process of renovating my house which dates from around 1830. The walls are around 2'6" thick and are constructed from random sandstone.
I am currently in the process of removing the gypsum plaster to the living room walls on the ground floor, my intention being on the gable wall to simply repoint any bits that need it with a hydraulic lime and leave it at that. Once the plaster was removed I was suprised at how quicky the walls seemed to dry out.
I've found the original fireplace on this wall which is about 3' x 4' in size and I want to use this for a proper fire (see cracked sanstone lintel thread). I think that the flue is in pretty good condition because when I pulled the old gas fire flue liner out nothing came down apart from a bit of soot. There are 4 stacks (separate) on the roof and 4 fireplaces in this wall (bedrooms etc), however I've found the set-pot in what will have been the old kitchen a few metres away from the large fireplace. I want to open this up and make a feature from it. My question is will the flue from the set-pot join the main fire's flue somewhere? and if so would it be sufficient to close off its flue just above the lintel with rockwool and plasterboard providing that a smoke test on the main flue is okay? Or would I need to consider a flue liner?
Any ideas or advice appreciated.
The main fire's flue will of course be swept before I use it.

 

[Anonymous]

We need pics of this wonderful find!!! It sounds terrific!

Not hydraulic - non hydraulic surely?

 

[Anonymous]

I'll send some pics.
Feebly hydraulic? A firm in Edinburgh knocked me up a motar mix from a sample I sent them.

Alan

 

[Anonymous]

Well, maybe - but why do you need hydraulic at all?

 

[Anonymous]

Because my mate who's a briccy and a C.O.W. told me to!
What should I use?

Alan

 

[Anonymous]

No need to be rude about your freind just because his a briccy.....:0)

 

[Anonymous]

It's like the one about the briccy and the joiner standing doing nothing on scaffold: The joiner was thinking but the briccy was just wasting time!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

Are you sure it wasn't the joiner thinking about the bricky wasting time...........

 

[Anonymous]

Unless this a seriously exposed gable, I'd use non-hydraulic.

 

[Anonymous]

Sorry about the quality.........of the pics I mean!

 

[Anonymous]

 

[Anonymous]

 

[Anonymous]

A 20k limit on pic size isn't good

 

[Anonymous]

No, I'm amazed you got so much pic in there under 20k. Changing jpeg colour depth from 24 bit to 16 bit will enable you to post more.

Despite seeing, well, not sure what, I still dont know what a set pot is!

NT

 

[Anonymous]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. On the last pic there's a shelf about half way up I think this was used to put a grill on. a fire would then be underneath this with a pan on top (set-pot?).

 

[Anonymous]

I thought that a set pot was a wash copper for laundry.

It must have been very hard work - fetching water, pouring it into the copper basin, setting a fire to heat the water, washing the clothes and having to bail out the dirty water etc etc.

Your pics were not what I expected a setpot to look like, though.

 

[Anonymous]

That's not like a north eastern sett pot by any stretch...
The one in my mam's house in Co Durham, the one that would have been in mine and those seen in other north eastern houses were seperate structures from the kitchen ranges.
It had a hearth built into a base on top of which was a structure with a built-in, very big, basin - I seem to remember it as copper from when I was a child but not sure of that.
I have a stone slab in the corner of the scullery where the sett pot was originally - there's only a two pot chimney up top and there is no sign of any where where the flue could have joined the range chimney but was probably at low level and somehow went up with the smoke from the range but I'd have thought that risky. An almost archaeological excavation of the inside of the fireplace ex-range opening was made when it was cleared out and no holes were found. It had been altered three times and the pot 1950's fireplace which was the last installation took up too much room in a small space. It was ugly too. So it went.
Sett pot was usually in the scullery rather than the actual kitchen because the scullery was where the dolly tub and wringer would have been used.
In my parents' house the bath was in the kitchen beside the sett pot - to make it easier to fill the bath. A very large hinged lid covered the bath, known as the bath top and why we were never squashed by it falling or being pulled down when we were all in the bath, I don't know! But it was a great platform to play on when it was down - it doubled as kitchen table too.

 

[Anonymous]

Sculleries and laudries and set- pots or wash coppers - I'll write about my recollections tomorrow. My fingers are freezing - on top of no heating we had a long power cut today which knocked off the electric heaters. Been to Yorkshire for lime and got back to a very cold house indeed!

However - this is, surely, the cooking hearth - which would have had probably a simple range added at some point. It's a bit hard to make out from the pics, but both of our large fireopenings like this have mysterious gouges and smoke marks which show various ranges must have been fitted over the years -and the baking oven? That's the door. And I suspect that the hole under was from the oven, which probably had a hole at the front. This was to rake out the ashes, and is a sophisticated version of the basic oven. No flue - fired on baking day by lighting a fire inside, when it was up to temperature the ashes raked out and cooking done.

 

[Anonymous]

I checked the base of where mine used to be --
The slab is 1000mms x 650mms which would have given room for a 500mms diam pot.
That agrees with what my memory tells me about the one when I was a kid.

 

[Anonymous]

Non-hydraulic putty and aggregate...