Smokey house-what to do?

[hellymelly]

We live in a fairly densely populated rural village. ever since we've moved here there has been a day here and there when the house gets very smokey, with coal and woodsmoke from the chimneys of other houses. This really bothers me as I have a dodgy chest and am on the edge of asthma I think. Anyway it was so infrequent that we put it down to a general smog and have just endured it by moving our mattress into the least smokey room for a night or two etc.
This past Winter it has been much worse. My chest is terrible, as soon as it gets a bit better we have another week of smoke coming in, and aside from how rubbish it makes me feel, I also sing and it wrecks my voice.
We think it narrows down to two or three chimneys that directly line up with our house, and the wind direction. Do you think it would be enough to secondary glaze the windows on the side facing the chimneys? We want to move in the next year or two and don't want to have to do every window if we can avoid it (georgian house with lovely sash windows). Also maybe some smoke is coming down the chimneys? I'm sitting here with bin bags taped over the window and still my chest is raw and my voice gravelly.

you aren't in a semi or terrace, are you, where a leaky flue can let in smoke from next door?

airflow in a heated or sunny house tends to be in at the bottom and out at the top. Do you get air coming in under the back door and round the letterbox to encourage this? The air at ground level is presumably fairly free of smoke. Are your windows very ill-fitting and draughty?

You can get a whole house ventilation system called a Lofty that blows air in to pressurise the house slightly and prevent adventitious draughts. They are usually fitted in the loft to blow cool air in against the upflow of warm air, but in your case it would need to be somewhere else.

We are in a semi actually, but the house next door doesn't have working fireplaces. We have a fan that sucks air in at basement level, and blows it out at ground level, as we live in a high radon area and our levels were a bit high. I did think that might in fact be making things worse but it seems to not make much difference (its off at the moment due to building work). The back door has a sort of extra airlock as we have a lean-to tacked onto that part of the house. The back is a story lower than the front door. The front door is draughty-ish,but our windows are average I would think for old sash ones.They aren't terribly draughty but they aren't like a draught free modern window.
So from what you say then, smoke probably isn't coming down the chimneys anyway, if the general airflow is upwards? So it would be in at the windows? When it is bad the least smokey rooms are the ones with windows facing the front, the side facing the chimneys seems to be the problem. But at times everywhere is smokey to some degree, we have even slept on the kitchen floor on one memorable occasion. (loved by small girls, not so by me and DH).