Hi, I wonder whether anyone can help with an unexpected problem I have with an old back boiler?
We have just moved into a 1950s house and having removed an old gas fire that was on the outside of the chimney breast, we have discovered that when the heating was converted to a combi system several years ago by the previous owners, the original solid fuel back burner was left in the chimney recess. We need to remove this as we would like to install a new gas fire that uses the recess.
The problem I am having is that the old boiler seems to have had the chimney built around it! It is extremely tightly wedged into the recess and appears to have been sealed in with some kind of lime plaster.
I have scraped as much of the lime plaster out of the way as possible and attacked it with a large wrecking bar but can't even get it to move. It seems to be sitting on a kind of fire brick and there are a couple of old pipes coming out of the side (which I assume are no longer live) that are certainly not helping, but they are too buried in the wall to be able to get a spanner on them or cut them. I'm pretty sure it must also be fixed elsewhere.
As the boiler is cast, I've even tried giving it some grief with a large lump hammer, thinking I might be able to crack it - as suggested in another post on here. But I couldn't crack it and the neighbour came around (it's on the party wall) because he was "concerned" so I gave up on that route for now.
So my question really is whether anyone has any ideas? I wondered about a big disc cutter, but not sure how that will work on cast and don't have one myself. I'm aware that the chimney is structural, so don't really want to start taking bricks out to release it.
The other thing that bothers me is that I can't see any lintel... in trying to get some leverage on the boiler, some small chunks of the front wall of the chimney breast cracked off above the opening but that was a very light weight (almost porous looking) concrete, which I assume is a liner of some kind? Will the lintel be higher up?
Thank you in advance for any advice.
K.
We have just moved into a 1950s house and having removed an old gas fire that was on the outside of the chimney breast, we have discovered that when the heating was converted to a combi system several years ago by the previous owners, the original solid fuel back burner was left in the chimney recess. We need to remove this as we would like to install a new gas fire that uses the recess.
The problem I am having is that the old boiler seems to have had the chimney built around it! It is extremely tightly wedged into the recess and appears to have been sealed in with some kind of lime plaster.
I have scraped as much of the lime plaster out of the way as possible and attacked it with a large wrecking bar but can't even get it to move. It seems to be sitting on a kind of fire brick and there are a couple of old pipes coming out of the side (which I assume are no longer live) that are certainly not helping, but they are too buried in the wall to be able to get a spanner on them or cut them. I'm pretty sure it must also be fixed elsewhere.
As the boiler is cast, I've even tried giving it some grief with a large lump hammer, thinking I might be able to crack it - as suggested in another post on here. But I couldn't crack it and the neighbour came around (it's on the party wall) because he was "concerned" so I gave up on that route for now.
So my question really is whether anyone has any ideas? I wondered about a big disc cutter, but not sure how that will work on cast and don't have one myself. I'm aware that the chimney is structural, so don't really want to start taking bricks out to release it.
The other thing that bothers me is that I can't see any lintel... in trying to get some leverage on the boiler, some small chunks of the front wall of the chimney breast cracked off above the opening but that was a very light weight (almost porous looking) concrete, which I assume is a liner of some kind? Will the lintel be higher up?
Thank you in advance for any advice.
K.