Chimney Inspections in Fairfield, Utah

Fairfield was settled in the 1850s, and the army camp that briefly made it one of the largest settlements in the territory was gone again within a few years. For a town of this size that leaves an unusually wide spread of building stock, and we are asked to inspect both ends of it: masonry from the settlement era, and a factory-built metal chimney on a house finished a couple of years ago. Those are not the same inspection, and a report that treats them the same way is not worth much to a buyer.

Old chimneys were built for a different fuel

A chimney built in the nineteenth or early twentieth century was built to vent coal or an open wood fire, and it was often built without a liner at all, relying on the mortared brick or stone itself to contain the flue gas. That worked passably for its intended use and it does not work for a modern airtight stove. A modern appliance runs at a different temperature and produces flue gas with different moisture content, and an unlined masonry flue simply cannot be trusted to keep combustion products out of the walls of the house. If somebody has connected a woodstove to an old unlined stack out here, we want to know before you rely on it.

What we are looking for with the camera

A visual check from the firebox and the roof tells you about a third of what matters. The rest is inside. We send a camera the length of the flue looking for missing mortar between liner tiles, cracked or displaced tiles, gaps where two flues share a stack with nothing between them, and the classic old-house problem of a flue that was rebuilt from the roofline up and left untouched below. That last one catches people out constantly. The visible part looks recently done and sound, and the part inside the house has not been touched in a century.

Buying or selling rural property

On an acreage sale, the fireplace and any stoves are frequently the item a general home inspector declines to assess and refers on. A Level 2 inspection is what closes that out. It is a camera scan of the full flue plus an examination of accessible attic and crawl space sections, and it ends in a dated written report with photographs that both sides can read. We do a lot of these in Cedar Valley, and we write them so that a finding is a finding and an opinion is labeled as one.

Outbuildings count

A stove in a shop, a barn or a detached garage is the same appliance with the same requirements, and it is the one that usually got installed on a Saturday with materials that were to hand. Improvised wall pass-throughs, single-wall pipe run too close to timber, and hearth protection made of whatever was flat are all common. We inspect those on the same visit if you ask, and we would rather you asked.

Everything we find comes with a photograph and a plain explanation of whether it is a safety item or something you can plan for. Licensed and insured, and we do not quote repairs off a finding we have not shown you.