Fireplace and Chimney Service Across Highland

Count the terminations before you book

One roof up here can be carrying a wood-burning firebox, two or three direct-vent gas units and the furnace flue, all terminating within a few feet of each other. People call and ask for a chimney sweep meaning one appliance, and we arrive to find four systems, only one of which burns wood. It matters for scheduling and it matters for price, so we would rather establish it on the phone. Walk the house, count the fireplaces, and if you can see the roof from the street, count the terminations too. They should agree.

The components are old enough to fail now

A home finished in the late nineties or early two-thousands is not new any more, and its hearth is the part where that shows first. Refractory panels crack and spall behind years of fires. Gasketing around the glass on a direct-vent gas unit goes hard and stops sealing. Blower motors seize. Sheet metal chase covers rust through at the low corner and drip into the chase for a year before anyone notices the stain. None of these are dramatic failures. They are wear, and they are the reason a house that has never had a problem starts having one all at once. Several of these parts are also discontinued, so on an older builder-grade appliance the honest answer is sometimes that a replacement insert costs less than chasing parts.

Big, tight houses fight their own chimneys

Modern construction here is well sealed, and that is a good thing for a heating bill. It is a hard thing for a fireplace. A powerful kitchen hood, a couple of bath fans and a running dryer can pull more air out of the building than it can draw back in, and the easiest opening left for replacement air is your flue. The fire goes sullen, the glass sooties, and on a three-level house the basement hearth is usually the one that suffers. That is a house problem, not a fireplace problem, and it is fixed with a make-up air path rather than with new parts. On the streets nearest the canyon, cold air draining downhill on winter nights adds to it. We test before we recommend anything.