Measuring Chimney height

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igotalake

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Hi all, I recently guestimated the height of a chimney to see if my cherry-picker could reach and I was wrong by a fair bit. To avoid that happening in the future I was wondering if there is such a thing as a handheld laser measuring device that can measure off an angled surface if you imagine pointing it from the ground up to the side of a chimney so the laser would hit the surface at 45 degrees. Not sure if it could be used like that but looking for any ideas that you can give.
Thanks in advance.
 
If you fix something like two bits of wood at 45 degrees to each other, put a level on the horizontal one then back away from the chimney, until you can sight the top of the chimney exactly along the edge of 45 degree one. If you now measure from where you are, back to the chimney, plus adding on, how high your 45 degree gadget was, it will match the height of your chimney.

Alternative method -
 
How about measure to the gutter then go into the attic and measure bedroom ceiling to top of roof space and add the two together. But depends where you chimney is if the picker will reach over as well as height. Something else you can do for the actual chimney is count the bricks and translate that to bricks at ground level and measure that.
 
You can use your high school maths! Good old Pythagoras. If you go outside in the evening with a laser measurer, you could measure from where you are to the top of the chimney. You can then measure how far away the chimney is along the floor (might be a little tricky with walls in the way).

Then you can can find the height by doing sqrt(d²-x²)
Where d is the diagonal distance and X is the horizontal distance.

Or, if you can't easily work out the horizontal distance, you can measure the diagonal distance (D1) walk backwards 5m and measure it again (D2) and use this formula to work out the height y. But it's a bit of a complicated formula
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Disclaimer - I'm on holiday and have had a few cocktails so my maths on the above formula might need checking.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the replys.

Nothing that I can just stand in the garden with and point at the area I want to reach?

It doesn't have to be strictly height that I'm measuring, just a linear distance between me and the thing I want to get to.
 
igotalake said:
Thanks for the replys.

Nothing that I can just stand in the garden with and point at the area I want to reach?

It doesn't have to be strictly height that I'm measuring, just a linear distance between me and the thing I want to get to.
Click to expand...

Check out the edited version of my comment before this one. You can do it with a laser measurerer
 
I'm sure your maths is good, I wonder if there is a programmable laser measure that could do that calc for me.. like they do the square and cubed metreage...

But if the laser can accurately measure to the top of the chimney then I'm good to go anyway, no need for the actual height. Can it though bounce off an inclined surface and back to me ?
 
For field archery they use hand held distance meter which accurately determines target distance .
 
So the target is inclined ? Do these laser measures generally have an accurate laser dot or something so you know what part you are measuring to?
 
foxhole said:
For field archery they use hand held distance meter which accurately determines target distance .
Click to expand...
Also used for golf
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igotalake said:
So the target is inclined ? Do these laser measures generally have an accurate laser dot or something so you know what part you are measuring to?
Click to expand...
Field archery uses foam animal targets. Not conventional bullseye targets.
 
Do you think that will work if the target is a 45 degree angle to the laser beam ?
 
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