Does the chimney need to be plastered indoors?

[Träguden]

I am renovating the kitchen and eventually the entire ground floor of our house from 1940. The plan is to expose the chimney which is currently plastered. The chimney consists of 6 flues and I heat the house with a pellet boiler.

I have exposed 3/4 of the chimney, the side I have not exposed is the one closest to the flue gas channel (one of the two channels on the far right). After some googling, I have become a bit uncertain whether the chimney must be plastered or not indoors.

If you believe all the answers found on byggahus.se, the chimney must be plastered, but I have spoken with two different chimney sweeps who both say that this is not the case nowadays. (Old regulations)

So now I pose the question here, have the regulations changed or must the chimney be plastered?

Or is it simply that it must be sealed, with or without plaster?

 

[Claes Sörmland]

Your house has a construction year, and certain building codes were in effect at that time. These building codes apply to your chimney. It used to be standard practice to construct a chimney with smoke channels, and the plaster was part of the gas tightness. Therefore, the chimney was required to be plastered. Usually, it should also not be built in such a way that you can't see if there are leaks.

If you want to make significant changes to your fireplaces (including the smoke channels), you need to submit a notice to the municipality about it. Then you must comply with current fire safety regulations.

For example, it should be considered a significant change to fire safety to remove the plaster from the chimney around the smoke channels. This is subject to notification. A solution could be an insert pipe that handles the tightness issue in a different way.

 

[JohanLun]

Another question I've been considering is rooms with a removed fireplace where the chimney breast has been wallpapered and parquet flooring laid right up to the chimney breast... Is that normally okay?

 

[Träguden]

Thank you for the quick response! Who performs the inspection of a significantly modified chimney? It would be helpful to speak with someone knowledgeable before making major changes.

 

[Claes Sörmland]

It depends on the building committee of your municipality, but it is usually the company that the municipality has contracted for fire protection inspections. In other words, the "chimney sweep."

 

[lnilsson]

Another question I've been wondering about is rooms with a removed fireplace but where the chimney breast has been wallpapered and parquet has been laid on the floor right up to the chimney breast... Is that normally okay?

From a fire safety perspective, I have no clue, but doing so is asking for cracks in the wall and floor. A chimney breast moves (mainly up and down) depending on heat, in a different "pace" than the rest of the house. So that's why there is often a different surface layer on both the wall and floor that belongs to the chimney breast.