The Daily Misanthrope

Folly of the Day

He Built the Extension Around the Boiler Flue. The Flue's Entire Purpose Is to Put the Exhaust Outside. It Now Ended in the Family's New Room.

Folly of the Day

A plate from an early twentieth-century textbook showing the correct connection of a domestic boiler and its flue pipes. — Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons / public domain

Adam's Building Construction Ltd, of Leeds Road, Bradford, began work on a domestic extension in January 2024. The extension was built over the property's existing gas service pipework, and the boiler flue was never relocated — so that when a Building Control inspector from City of Bradford Metropolitan Council looked at the job on 22 May 2024, he found the flue terminating inside the new room. Building Control had warned the company more than once during construction that the pipework and the flue had to be moved. The gas installation was classified as immediately dangerous and the supply was disconnected. At Leeds Magistrates' Court on 7 August 2026 the company was fined £10,000 with £4,263 costs; its director, Mohammed Adam Azhar, was fined £1,000 with a £400 victim surcharge. HSE inspector David Beaton said the failure to plan the work properly 'could have easily had fatal consequences for the family living in the property.'

A flue is not a component. It is a decision, taken by other people, a long time ago, that combustion products belong on the far side of the wall from the people. Almost everything a builder knows he knows this way — as inherited conclusions whose reasoning he has never had to reconstruct, because reconstructing it is expensive and the conclusion works. The confident man's error is to mistake his fluency in the conclusions for authorship of them, and therefore to believe he may revise. He does not think he is building a room around a carbon-monoxide outlet; he thinks he is solving a scheduling problem, and the flue is in the way of the schedule. What is remarkable here is not the ignorance but the persistence of it under correction: the inspector said it, said it again, and the wall went up anyway. Being told is the cheapest information available to a human being, and it is the kind we discount hardest, because accepting it costs us the standing we imagine we have already earned. The family got a lovely new room. It was, briefly, a chimney with furniture in it.

Source: Health and Safety Executive

The Daily Misanthrope is a daily curated catalogue of human folly, stupidity, and civilizational decay — reporting the follies of humanity, without illusion. Each morning we publish the day's most instructive failures of judgment, alongside the Misanthrope Index.Read the latest edition: browse the full archive of daily editions, or read the complete library of special editions — evergreen catalogues of human folly including Great Military Blunders, Neighbors Behaving Badly, Scholars Behaving Badly, Doctors Behaving Badly, Artists Behaving Badly, Composers Behaving Badly, Writers Behaving Badly, Who Judges the Judges, and The Confident Men.

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Acabashi via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
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ThePrint

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He Built the Extension Around the Boiler Flue. The Flue's Entire Purpose Is to Put the Exhaust Outside. It Now Ended in the Family's New Room.

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