Dartmouth business owner Rob Smith is all steamed up over the lack of ventilation at his new-look cafe – which is driving customers away and wrecking the new shop flooring.

Rob claims he was promised a commercial ventilation system when the Market Café was given an all-glass facelift as part of the £400,000 market complex revamp last summer.

Instead he has been left with a domestic system that does not even have a proper outlet – after the council market owners discovered that the chimney it is supposed to link into has been blocked up.

Now Rob says he is faced with his customers getting overheated in the summer and steamed up in the winter.

And the council has told him it will only install the better system if Rob is prepared to go halves on the £2,000 cost.

Rob, who has run the Market Café with his wife Collette for the last five years said: 'It is now all glass and there are no windows that can be opened.

'In the winter I am faced with the windows becoming steamed up on a daily basis.

'It is so bad we end up with puddles on the floor which has even started to lift in one corner. It will get damp and ruined.

'In the summer it is astonishingly hot in here. It reached 105 degrees in the kitchen on one day because of the lack of ventilation.'

He said that in the summer it was possible to open the doors and people could sit outside. But during the winter the café becomes so badly affected by condensation that the glass walls stream with water.

Rob and Collette ran the Flavel Café for three years before taking over the Market Café.

They had to close down for four months last year while the huge facelift affecting the whole market complex went ahead.

Rob said he could not afford the £1,000 the council was now saying he would have to fork out.

He said the ventilation problem was the only complaint he had following the work on the cafe.

He said the council had publicly promised him they would install an adequate ventilation system when the plans for the market project were first unveiled.

'I was told it would be fitted with a proper catering extraction unit,' he said.

He also pointed out that he had been forced to rearrange his entire kitchen layout so that the extraction system could use an existing chimney – which has turned out to be unusable.

Dartmouth Town Council clerk Chris Horan admitted that it had not been realised that the old chimney was blocked off and could not be used as part of an extraction system.'I don't think we were able to put in the system that was originally hoped, which was a fairly basic system using the existing chimney,' he said.

He said the council's corporate property committee had looked at Rob's concerns and had come up with the £2,000 new ventilation system on condition he pays half the cost.