I know I will regret this, but I felt compelled to comment on this blog. I am the MD of Burley Appliances and have been very closely involved in the design, testing, writing of British standards, and general introduction of flueless fires to Britain.
Over the past 11 years I seem to have spent half my life trying to limit the damage done to these marvelous products from misinformed comment, some from poorly researched speculation, and some from malicious rumor from competitors who regard them as a threat to their flued gas fires.
Safety is of course of paramount importance. Every single flueless fire that Burley has ever produced is bench run for 30 minutes and the combustion recorded (I think this makes us unique in the gas industry). Therefore I literally have more factual evidence regarding flueless fires than probably anyone else on the planet.
Our in house test criteria are 4 times stricter than what British standards allow, but even at these limits the products are designed so that we literally never have one fail.
The valves Burley insists on using are designed so that even if they were adjusted in the field, the maximum flow rate could never overload the catalytic converter.
Every fire is designed so that it must pass all standards even with the cat' disabled.
We have had fires on test for the equivalent of 40 years use. We do everything to try to reproduce extreme conditions of misuse: overloading, spraying polish and solvents into the cat', connecting it to the wrong gas, over pressure, over heating etc etc. Periodically we send a cat' away for analysis. After all this use they are still performing to 100% of their original efficiency. We have NEVER had a cat' fail. Even if one did, it would not pose a risk.
Oxygen depletion sensors and flame failure devices are fitted to all products. If the gas pressure to the appliance increases by more than a couple of millibars the fire cuts off.
The fire which caused the fatality was not a Burley but this is not something to bask in. It is of course a great tragedy to all those involved as well as 'tarring' ALL flueless fire with the same brush. It resulted in standards being changed so this could not happen again.
In Britain there are around 15,000,000 flued gas fires. Heaters with chimneys and flues kill between 20 and 50 people every year, so why don't we hear comments like 'don't fit a flued fire, they're dangerous'? In America there are around 20,000,000 flueless fires which have been in use for up to 20 years, without a single death. In Japan there are around 50,000,000 flueless heaters in use.
Flued heaters rely on the chimney for the fire to operate safely. A chimney is fallible. If a bird builds its nest in it over the summer, or the masonry collapses, the flue could be blocked. The next time the fire is used the combusted gasses will enter the house. A flueless fire does not rely on a chimney to operate, it MUST be designed to burn extremely cleanly and therefore it can provide an unsurpassed level of safety.
For a layman, I think the simplest way to look at it is that a gas cooker is a flueless heater but without a cat' and the strict combustion regulations. A flueless fire is equivalent in output to just one small ring on the cooker.
The other major advantage which flueless fires provide is fuel efficiency. The efficiencies claimed by many flued fires are totally unjustifiable (this is another one of my battlegrounds which I won't get started on). Tests which Burley have carried out show that a flued fire loses around 2/3rds of its heat straight up the chimney. The chimney also draws huge amounts of warm air from the rest of the house, which is replaced by cold air creeping around windows and doors. A flueless fire is 100% efficient, and the warm air tends to radiant outwards to benefit the rest of the house.
If you assume that a gas fire is used for 3 hours per day for 4 months of the year, if all the flued fires in Britain were replaced with flueless, the gas saved would be 23,520,000,000 kWh EVERY year! Regardless of views on global warming, surely it is foolhardy to waste this amount of energy when there is a viable alternative.
I know that all the above information will not change many people’s opinions. Even in the face of incontrovertible facts there will always be an element of 'I've been fitting fires now for 30 years and a mate told me.....'. Strangely it often seems to be older fitters who are extremely set in their ways that can't handle the new technology. Most younger fitters can see how ridiculous it is having to put a hole in the roof to let out the gasses from a heater with bad combustion, along with all the heat.
Just for the record, Burley are a major manufacturer of flued fires AND flueless fires. Financially it does not matter to me which I sell.
