If you knew what your neighbour was burning

Somewhere on your street tonight, someone is putting a pallet on the fire. Nationally, 49% of stove owners admit to it. 38% have burnt painted or treated wood. 11% have fed a Christmas tree into a log burner. Three per cent said nappies, and we'd rather not think about that either.

Those figures landed this week, from HETAS, during Chimney Fire Safety Week. None of it is as harmless as it looks.

Wet or treated wood burns cool. What doesn't leave the stove as heat condenses on the way up instead and sets hard inside the chimney as glazed creosote — black, shiny, and about as flammable as it looks. One season of it takes a serious bite out of the flue.

Why the house next door matters

Sunderland is terraces. Roker, Fulwell, Millfield, Southwick, Hendon — street after street of Victorian and Edwardian stock, and those chimneys were built as shared stacks. Your flue and next door's often sit side by side in the same brickwork, separated by a single course of brick and a hundred years of mortar.

Mortar doesn't last a hundred years. When a joint goes, smoke crosses. We've been out to people convinced their own stove was leaking when the smell was coming from a neighbour's fire two feet away, through the party wall. It isn't common. It isn't rare either.

Ten fires, and the ones nobody counts

Here's the good news, and it's genuinely good. Tyne and Wear recorded ten chimney fires in the year to March 2026. Devon and Somerset had 135. Kent had 74. We're one of the safest corners of England for this.

A chimney fire is the loud failure. It isn't the common one.

Carbon monoxide is the quiet one, and it doesn't need a fire to reach you — only a flue that isn't drawing properly. A nest. A collapsed joint. A bird guard packed solid. A stove sealed into an opening with no register plate behind it. ONS puts accidental CO deaths in the UK above sixty a year, and nobody counts the near misses, because nobody knows about them.

What's actually up there

A terraced flue, cut open. Almost none of this is visible from your living room.

The bit that costs money

Home insurers commonly expect the chimney swept at the recommended interval by a qualified sweep, and the certificate is what proves it happened. After a fire, meaning to book someone isn't evidence.

Then there's selling up. Conveyancing asks for the install certificate on any stove fitted since 2005. No certificate, and the sale sits still while an indemnity policy gets sorted.

When to book

Twice a year on wood, once a year on smokeless — lined or unlined makes no difference. 42% of England's chimney fires land between January and March, which is precisely why now is the right time and October is the wrong one.

And if your stove has sat cold since spring, don't light it until someone's been up it. The summer rate runs to the end of September, which is as good a nudge as any.