Chimney and Fireplace Service Across Provo

A lot of these flues have no history

This city has an unusually large share of rented houses, divided houses and basement apartments, and paperwork for a chimney almost never travels with the keys. Owners change, tenants change, and the flue keeps working right up until it does not. When somebody calls about a property they have held for six months, the honest place to begin is a look inside rather than a sweep, because nobody yet knows whether the liner is intact or whether anyone has burned in it at all.

A divided house adds a second layer. Two dwellings under one roof usually means two appliances and one shared roof line, and a range hood or a bath fan running in the lower unit can pull hard enough to spoil a fire upstairs. That is a solvable problem, but it is much better found during a scheduled visit than during a January cold snap.

The first ten minutes of a fire

Under a valley inversion the air outside is dense and dead still, and a cold flue standing full of that air resists the first push of smoke off a new fire. The fire lights, the smoke has nowhere to climb, and it rolls out the front of the firebox instead. Warming the flue before you build the fire fixes most of it: hold a rolled sheet of newspaper up in the throat for a minute, or lay the fire top down so the hot gases start at the top of the load. What technique will not fix is a flue whose opening has narrowed with deposit, and telling those two apart is most of what we do on a first visit.

What one visit settles, and what it does not

A sweep and a basic inspection establish the condition of the firebox, the smoke chamber, the damper, the liner and the crown, and you get photographs of each so you are not taking our word for it. They do not establish what is happening inside a closed chase wall or behind finished basement framing. If something points that way, staining, an odor, warmth on a wall that should be cool, we will tell you what we suspect and what it would take to look properly rather than guess on your behalf. We are licensed and insured, and we would rather leave a question open than answer it wrong.