Happy New Year folks, hope this year brings everyone everything they desire and more. This year is our first year with a wood burner and we are experiencing great problems with our lovely white walls turning a lovely shade of yuk. Does anyone have any advice as to cleaning the yuk or is this something you have to live with? Many thanks. C

Sorry, what´s yuk ?

Have you not seen bil's epic, I think it's on page 2 now.
I'm no bil but if you have yuk your stoves not working as it should.
Cleaning yuk try sugar soap.

If the yuk is smoke based you have a major problem and must address it before using the stove again. That's because if soot comes into the room, then so does a lot of monoxide, with possibly fatal consequences.

My money would be on it being a partial or complete blockage and the chimney needs sweeping tooty sweety.

Or, is it mould, which is always a perennial problem. The Spanish clean it off with bleach, which is why you see fr*gging MOUNTAINS of bottles of bleach shifted every year between now and spring. If it is mould, then get a clean soft bristlr broom and a pail of warm/hot water with just a drop of washing up liquid. You dip the broom, shake off the surplus and scrub about a sq metre at a time, Dry it vigorously with an old towel and move on.

We got rid of ours like that last year, and it didn't start to return till now.

A lot cheaper and healthier that splashing bleach around like a mad thing.

Okay, google and wikipedia come up with zilch... What is yuk???

gunge - dirt - muck- mould etc.

yukky brown would mean a dirty brown.

Slang English

Thanks, it didn´t compute in the context of the OP´s message for me.

Check the chimney for holes, I´d say. Or have it swept.

Holes in the flue at any point will not cause soot and smoke to enter the room unless there is a partial or complete blockage. A flue acts like the straw in a milkshake. It's as tho the sky sucks on your chimney, so a hole in the flue allows air to enter the flue where it is entrained withe the smoke and fumes.

That in itself only causes a problem where the hole is so big that the entrained air can chill the flue gasses below the dew point so that condensation takes place, causing surprisingly large amounts of black watery fluid to run down the flue