Cottonwood Heights · Salt Lake County
Inspecting Aging Flues in Cottonwood Heights
A large share of the housing on this bench went up between the 1960s and the 1980s, which means a great many flues here are running on their original clay tile. That material has a service life, and a lot of it has been reached.
What happens to clay tile after fifty winters
Clay flue liner is a good material with one weakness: it expands and contracts at a different rate than the brick surrounding it, and it does not tolerate rapid temperature change well. Fifty years of heating cycles, plus any chimney fire the house had before you owned it, produces hairline cracking, then spalled faces, then open joints where the mortar between tiles has fallen away. None of that is visible from the firebox. A flashlight from below shows you the first three feet of a thirty-foot flue.
An open joint matters because the liner is the barrier between combustion gases and the wood framing of your house. Where a joint has failed, heat and gases reach brick, and behind that brick there are joists and rafters. This is not theoretical. It is the ordinary way older masonry chimneys become unsafe, and the only way to establish whether yours has done so is a camera scan of the full length.
Which level of inspection
A Level 1 covers what is readily accessible and is appropriate for a system in regular, unchanged use with no symptoms. A Level 2 adds the video scan and covers accessible attic and crawl space where the chimney passes through. Buying or selling, changing appliance or fuel, or any event that could have stressed the chimney puts you into Level 2. Given the age of the housing stock here, we recommend Level 2 for any bench home whose flue has not been scanned in the last decade, regardless of whether anything is being sold.
Most of the scans we book in Cottonwood Heights are attached to a sale, and the pattern repeats: a well-kept bench home of that era, an original clay tile flue nobody has ever put a camera up, and a general inspector's single cautious line about the chimney that neither side of the deal can price. A scan turns that line into a known quantity before it turns into a negotiation.
Documentation you can use
Findings come back written, with a photograph or a still from the camera attached to each item, and with safety issues listed separately from maintenance recommendations. In a transaction that separation is what stops a negotiation from turning into a guessing match. In a home you are staying in, it tells you what to plan for and what can wait.
Questions
Inspection in Cottonwood Heights — common questions
Our chimney has never given us any trouble. Why scan it?
Because the failures that matter in a fifty-year-old clay liner do not announce themselves. Open joints and cracked tiles produce no symptom you would notice from the room until something goes badly wrong, and the camera is the only way to see them.
We are selling. Which inspection does the buyer's lender want?
A Level 2. It is the scope that includes the video scan of the flue and produces documentation with photographs. A visual-only report tends to get sent back with a request for the camera work anyway.
If the liner has failed, does the whole chimney have to come down?
Usually not. A stainless liner can often be installed inside the existing masonry, which restores a continuous barrier without rebuilding the structure. Whether that works depends on flue dimensions and the condition of the surrounding brick, which is what the inspection determines.
Do you inspect after a chimney fire?
Yes, and it should not be skipped. A chimney fire can crack tile and open joints in minutes, and a chimney that looks unchanged from outside can be unusable afterwards. That inspection is Level 2 at minimum.
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Our other services here
Chimney Sweep Chimney Repair Fireplace Repair Installation Gas Fireplace Caps & Dampers Dryer Vents All Cottonwood Heights services
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