Thatched house insurance and wood burners

[88v8]

....found that the lighting circuit was in a very dangerous condition and required complete replacement. Mice had chewed through no end of the cable sheaving.

All cabling in the roof spaces of thatched houses should be in metal conduit... mice, squirrels.... at least one can eat squirrels... :shock:

Ivor

 

[Penners]

at least one can eat squirrels...

So I believe. I understand that you can also eat his nuts*.



*If you can find them.

 

[tobydog]

Everyone talks about Location, Location, Location. My mantra is Caveat Emptor, Caveat Emptor, Caveat Emptor!!

Coincidentally I received a letter last week from the Suffolk Fire Service. They also wanted to spook me about the perils of thatch ownership and offered me an opportunity to attend two midweek evening talks on the subject. I live in Stutton which is about as far south in Suffolk as you can get. The two talks were in Beccles and Eye!!!.

Whilst having a firework land on your roof is clearly not a good thing, I sit in the camp that believes the majority of fires start in the loft or where the chimney touches the thatch. We have just had the chimney swept and the flue inspected and all is in order. This is a condition of the insurance but something I feel I should do whether I was insured or not.

Utmost good faith doesn't seem to carry much weight these days, however, the idea is that one should always behave and act as though uninsured whether you have cover or not.

 

[tobydog]

Not normally a problem Penners!! :shock:

 

[Flyfisher]

Whilst having a firework land on your roof is clearly not a good thing, I sit in the camp that believes the majority of fires start in the loft or where the chimney touches the thatch. We have just had the chimney swept and the flue inspected and all is in order. This is a condition of the insurance but something I feel I should do whether I was insured or not.

I've no direct experience of thatch but my understanding is that one of the problems is that most fires do, indeed, begin in the attic space and that when the fire brigade turn up they aften have to do more damage to the thatch by removing it to attack the underlying fire, as it is clearly of limited use to hose down a waterproof thatched roof.

Hopefully, a firework landing on top of thatch could only cause limited damage before it could be more easily extinguished. I guess it all depends on how quickly thatch becomes an inferno.

Two random thoughts:
- are there no fire-supressing treatments that can be sprayed onto thatch?
- are there any gas-based automatic extinguisher systems that could be installed in an attic space? It should be fairly easy to flood an attic with non-flammable gas in the event of a fire being detected, thus extinguishing it before any real damage is done. Such things are commonplace in commercial computer rooms. Perhaps the cost would be too great?

 

[tobydog]

FF - there are several things on the market to suppress thatch fires. You can spray the thatch with something but it's only the surface. Problem is that a loft fire can smoulder in the thatch for sometime and it's probably only once they break cover that they truly burst into flames. You can buy flue sensors but the kit isn't cheap.

Unfortunately ours is currently the worst scenario. Very dry reed lying on a bitumen felt with no fire suppressing material of any sort. Cables unducted and, until recently, a naked bulb hanging from a nail. The light is now sorted thankfuklly.