'Cowboy contractors burned hole in my bedding while installing stove'

A woman has slammed cowboy contractors after their botched stove installation left a burned hole in her bedding and could have started a house fire.

Emma Downer, 36, from Bristol, discovered a singed hole on her bedroom pillow following the dodgy job. The content creator, who goes by DIYwithEmma, assumed she could trust a HETAS-accredited installer to help with her woodburning stove. But months after it was fitted, she noticed that a part of her pillow had been decimated.

She shared a video on TikTok to raise awareness over dodgy contractors and explained that the workmen had even drilled a hole through her neighbour's wall. The creator said she was left stunned when she realised they had failed to cover the chimney flue, which she only noticed when she smelled her bed burning.

Fortunately, she realised before a fire erupted. Speaking about the nightmare moment, she said: "It's the disregard for safety that they were happy to completely disregard my personal safety. I suspect their motivations were to make a quick buck. I don't know if they were ever genuinely interested in what they were doing. They were definitely not competent."

In hindsight, Emma wonders if there were bad signs from the start. "I had called up a company that was fairly local to have a wood burner installed and even some of the initial interactions I had with them were a little bit off," she said. "Maybe that was a red flag that I should have picked up. The first day that they were installing it, I got a call at work to say that they drilled through into the next house, which I was mortified by because my neighbours were new and I hadn't met them yet."

Emma told the workmen she would only pay them once they'd fixed the hole in her neighbour's wall but couldn't trust a word they said. "They [the workmen] would try different ways of claiming that they've done the work when they hadn't, so they'd send a text to say, 'We've finished now,' she said. "And I'd say, 'What about the repair work?' They'd say, 'Yes, that too'. Then I'd find out that they hadn't done it or that there were still some things left to do."

Unfortunately, Emma only discovered the uncovered flue was a serious fire hazard about a year after the work was completed, trusting that the work had been completed competently. She said the singed pillow had fallen from the bed and was touching the bare flue so decided to reach out to HETAS to flag the problem. Emma said HETAS informed her the workman in question no longer worked for the accredited company she used, which had since made improvements to safety, but later HETAS confirmed the company lost its accreditation completely.

Emma consulted two separate HETAS engineers for their expertise who made adjustments and gave Emma guidance on how to build a wooden cover around the chimney flue to make it safe. "So what I did was I consulted with HETAS from that point onwards," she said. "But I also had two separate HETAS engineers come and review it, to do a couple of things to check that nothing else with it was unsafe, which was the main thing for me that was important. So I had two really great consultations with those two people.

"They came in, they did some operations themselves because they had some materials that made that easier than me doing it myself. I was able to sort of take it from there in terms of building the cover for the flue, for example." Emma said she doesn't want her viewers to be put off from using trades people because many are trustworthy and competent, and we need tradespeople to help us with difficult jobs or sometimes jobs we just don't want to do.

Emma's top tips:

• A recommendation from a friend is always best
• Make sure the contractor is accredited with a recognised body where possible
• If you have issues with the work, get in touch with the accreditation bodies immediately and put the problem in writing.