Chimney and Fireplace Service in Elk Ridge, Utah

Metal chimneys outnumber brick ones here

Because so much of this town went up in recent decades of subdivision building, the typical hearth is a factory-built firebox venting through insulated stainless pipe. That pipe runs inside a framed chase clad in stone or stucco, which from the street is difficult to tell apart from a solid masonry stack. It is a sound system, but it ages differently. The chase cover is usually sheet metal, and a flat one ponds water until the seams open. Ice sits in the flashing joint at roof level from December onward. The pipe itself has a service life of its own; joints loosen and inner liners deteriorate regardless of how new the house looks. Before we quote anything we establish which of the two systems is actually on your roof, because a repair that is correct for one is wasted money on the other.

The burn season runs long

Being above the valley floor is pleasant on the days the inversion settles underneath, but it comes with colder nights and a heating season that opens earlier in the fall and closes later in the spring. A flue worked for five or six months collects proportionally more deposit than one worked for three. The once-a-year schedule that suits an occasional fireplace lower down can leave a stove up here running dirty by midwinter. If you burn most evenings, we would rather look at it in January than take your word for it in September.

Cold drives the second half of that problem. Flue gas that meets a cold outer wall condenses, and condensed creosote is the sticky, tarry sort that hardens into glaze. Glaze does not brush off. Taking it out calls for powered tooling, sometimes with a softening agent applied first, and we will say so plainly instead of running an ordinary sweep and declaring the job done.

Lots that back onto brush

A house with dry oak scrub behind it has a reason to care about spark control that a house in the middle of a block does not. We check that the cap screen is intact, that nobody has removed it to stop it clogging, and that the crown underneath it is not shedding grit into the flue.