Payson · Utah County
Sweeping Payson Stoves and Fireplaces
The habit that fills a Payson chimney is not burning too much wood. It is burning it too slowly. Damping a stove down for an overnight burn is the single most reliable way to make creosote.
The overnight burn, and what it does upstairs
Wood heat is genuinely practical at this end of the valley, and plenty of households here run a stove as a real heat source rather than an occasional pleasure. That brings a particular practice with it: loading the firebox at bedtime and closing the air control down so the load smolders through until morning. It works. The house is still warm at six in the morning. It is also the most efficient method anyone has found for coating a flue in creosote.
The mechanism is straightforward. Wood that is burning slowly at low temperature releases its volatile compounds without burning them. Those compounds go up the flue as vapor, meet a chimney wall that is far cooler than a hot fire would keep it, and condense there as tar. Do it every night from November to March and the accumulation is not gradual, it is dramatic. We have taken buckets out of stove flues in houses where the owner was certain they burned only a modest amount of wood, and they were right about the amount.
The alternative is not giving up overnight heat. It is burning smaller loads hotter and more often, using a stove sized correctly for the space instead of one that has to be choked to avoid roasting you out, and having the flue checked partway through the season rather than only before it.
Where the deposit actually sits
On a stove or insert, most of it is not high in the chimney. It is in the baffle at the top of the firebox, in the connector pipe between the stove and the wall or ceiling, and in the first few feet above the thimble. Those are the coolest, most turbulent parts of the path. A sweep done only from the roof, dropping a brush down and calling it finished, misses the section that actually matters. We pull the baffle, break down and clean the connector, and brush the flue from below.
Firewood, briefly and honestly
A lot of wood in this town comes off the mountain rather than off a truck, cut in fall and burned that same winter. It will burn. It will not burn well, because a quarter of its weight is water that has to be boiled away before the wood can reach a temperature that burns its own smoke. The single cheapest improvement available to a wood burner is being a year ahead: splitting this winter's wood last spring, stacked off the ground with the top covered and the sides open.
Questions
Chimney Sweep in Payson — common questions
Is it bad to damp the stove down overnight?
It is the main cause of heavy creosote, yes. If you need overnight heat, a smaller load burned hotter in a correctly sized stove beats a large load choked to a smolder. If you do burn that way, plan on having the flue checked mid-season rather than once a year.
How much creosote is too much?
The rough guide is an eighth of an inch. At a quarter inch it should be swept before the next fire. Beyond that, or if the deposit is hard and shiny rather than flaky, brushing alone will not remove it and it needs a rotary or chemical treatment first.
Do you clean the stove pipe as well as the chimney?
Yes, and it is often where the worst of it is. We break down the connector pipe, pull the baffle out of the stove and clean both, then brush the flue. Cleaning only the vertical section leaves the dirtiest part of the system in place.
The wood I cut last fall is fine to burn now, isn't it?
It will light, but it is probably still holding a lot of water. Green wood spends the first part of every burn boiling that off instead of making heat, which cools the flue and produces creosote. A full year split and stacked makes a very noticeable difference.
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