MEDIA DRUM WORLD
+44 (0) 333 321 1546
www.mediadrumworld.com
picturedesk@mediadrumworld.com

Cowboy Stove to Fire UK

By Sophie Jones

**EXCLUSIVE**

THIS WOMAN from Bristol was left furious after her bedding started burning because of a dangerously installed stove by a cowboy contractor.

Content creator DIY educator Emma Downer (36) from Bristol, UK, known as DIYwithEmma on TikTok and YouTube, shared a shocking video where she showed a singed hole in a pillow from her bed.

She has renovated most of her home entirely herself but called in a HETAS-accredited installer to fit the woodburning stove.

To her horror, the workmen that turned up were rude, often lied, drilled a hole through her neighbour’s wall, and failed to properly cover the chimney flue – a dangerous error Emma only noticed due to the terrifying smell of her burning bedding.

Luckily, Emma found the singed pillow, which had fallen from the bed and was touching the bare flue, before a fire started but the scare made her question the entire job and she reached out to HETAS to flag the problem.

Emma said HETAS informed her the workman in question no longer worked for the accredited company she used, which had since made improvements to safety, but later HETAS confirmed the company lost its accreditation completely.

Emma consulted two separate HETAS engineers for their expertise who made adjustments and gave Emma guidance on how to build a wooden cover around the chimney flue to make it safe.

The experience has left her angry and she fears customers with less building experience may have been ripped off.

“I feel probably angry more than anything. It’s the disregard for safety – that they were happy to completely disregard my personal safety,” she said.

“So I think that's how I felt, angry that it had happened and that there were other people being put in this position.

“I suspect their motivations were to make a quick buck.

“I don't know if they were ever genuinely interested in what they were doing. They were definitely not competent.”

In hindsight, Emma wonders if there were bad signs from the start.

“I had called up a company that was fairly local to have a wood burner installed and even some of the initial interactions I had with them were a little bit off,” she said.

“Maybe that was a red flag that I should have picked up.

“The first day that they were installing it, I got a call at work to say that they drilled through into the next house, which I was mortified by because my neighbours were new and I hadn't met them yet.

“I actually had really difficult neighbours at my last property, it was the reason that I moved.

“And so it was really important to me that I had a good relationship with my neighbours.

“So this was not ideal as the first way that I would meet them.”

Emma said it was painstaking to get the builder to fix the problem and she was constantly misled and had to double-check everything with her neighbour’s estate agent.

“Getting them to repair the work was quite challenging because I would speak to the estate agent directly and say, ‘Have they spoken to you?’ she said.

“And they would say, ‘Yes, they have, they're really horrible. They're very rude’.

Emma told the workmen she would only pay them once they’d fixed the hole in her neighbour’s wall but couldn’t trust a word they said.

“They [the workmen] would try different ways of claiming that they've done the work when they hadn't, so they'd send a text to say, ‘We've finished now,’ she said.

“And I'd say, 'What about the repair work?’ They'd say, ‘Yes, that too’”.

“Then I'd find out that they hadn't done it or that there were still some things left to do.”

Unfortunately, Emma only discovered the uncovered flue was a serious fire hazard about a year after the work was completed, trusting that the work had been completed competently.

“So what I did was I consulted with HETAS from that point onwards,” she said.

“But I also had two separate HETAS engineers come and review it, to do a couple of things to check that nothing else with it was unsafe, which was the main thing for me that was important.
“So I had two really great consultations with those two people.

“They came in, they did some operations themselves because they had some materials that made that easier than me doing it myself.

“I was able to sort of take it from there in terms of building the cover for the flue, for example.”

Emma said she doesn't want her viewers to be put off from using trades people because many are trustworthy and competent, and we need tradespeople to help us with difficult jobs, jobs that need certification, for example, or sometimes jobs we just don't want to do.

Here is some of Emma’s top tips:
• A recommendation from a friend is always best
• Make sure the contractor is accredited with a recognised body where possible
• If you have issues with the work, get in touch with the accreditation bodies immediately and put the problem in writing.

ENDS