I would suspect that the conmbination of size, diameter and sheer force of the draught would tend to draw most of the soot up the stack and out the top. Certainly the heavy clouds of thick black smoke seen in pictures of large installations ( and, for that matter, warships ) would suggest that

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I used to work in a unit in an old cloth mill; along the side of one of our workshops was an old wooden ladder something like 80 foot long.

I was told it was used when cleaning the chimney, though I always wondered how they put it in :confused:

I've got some pictures somewhere, I'll see if I can find them...

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There is evidence that at least some sort of cleaning took place in the flues of the boiler (and perhaps the voids leading to the stack?). In Pole's 1844 Treatise on the Cornish Pumping Engine he describes tests on an engine in which "The boiler and flues had not been cleaned for eleven months." Perhaps this suggests that it was part of a maintenance programme.

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i was boilerman at the elk mill in royton for 10 years up to its demolition in 1998,it had a huge chimney as seen in pic,we had a hartley & sugden locamotive type boiler and a vekos multifuel both fed on coal nuts with forced draught.
both flues went into a collector chamber before exiting up the chimney along a 30ft passage.
once a year we shut down for 2 weeks (oldham wakes) and cleaned out 3ft of red hot soot from the collector chamber...melted wellies hell yes. the base of the chimney was a mixture of 50 yrs worth of soot and bricks 15ft deep but the chimney walls were coated with minimal soot,internaly industrial type chimneys are pretty much self cleaning as the encrustations of soot fall off over time to be swept up by the likes of me 😉
edit...forgot the pic :oops:
🔗Personal-Album-252-Image-55515[linkphoto]Personal-Album-252-Image-55515[/linkphoto][/link]

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eee, lad, din't tha' wear clogs?

I used to do occasional crack surveys for London Brick in their kilns around Peterborough, and these were always kept at a minimum temperature - there was a railway track that went from one end to the other and the bricks rolled through at a steady speed 24/7, but occasionally they would be inspected by walking through and having a look

I had a pair of wooden-soled clogs I bought in ( I think ) Ingleton in the 1970s, they were ideal; wooden soles and leather uppers with leather laces which lasted two or three days before breaking! I just threw the laces away after each inspection, as the job was so rare.

I had a 1960s fibreglass hard hat with a string-and-leather lining which I kept for the job, wore it with a welders' hood underneath and a set of welders' leathers which were quite good because the red-hot scats would just make little pin-marks.

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At Inverkip power station (a seriously big chimney, with five flues), the method was to hang a chain down the flue, connected at the bottom and attached to an electric motor at the top.

Running the motor made the chain flail around the inside of the flue, knocking the soot down to the bottom to be collected.

Afterwards, one poor sod was sent down all 775ft to make sure the bricks were undamaged.

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nah clogs were nay good lad.
the reason we used wellies is we filled em with water before going in the flue chamber as they lasted a bit longer and your feet didnt burn.....35 mins per pair of wellies was good going and i used also a helmet fed with air from a small compressor and a paper j suit which always caught afire.
the worst job though was climbing through the boiler top mudhole into the waterspace with a high preasure hose to blast the blisters/rust mud off the inside ready for ultrasound inspection,you came out looking like a mobile chocolate bar. ::)

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I've been reminded that the clogs were NCB ones, issued to coking plant workers apparently, for walking on top of the retort banks.

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clogs would be better but too expensive and of course i would have been laughed at for sugesting clogs...however i also got laughed at for sugesting that the asbestos/plaster coating on the steam pipes was dangerous....no health & safety in the early 80s you just got on with it.

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Foundry workers also wore wooden soled boots.