Fireplace and Draft Repair in Provo

What people actually call about

Smoke rolling into the room instead of going up. A gas unit that clicks and never catches. A damper that will not close, or will not open. Cracked refractory panels in the firebox. A blower that has started to howl. Those five cover most of the fireplace repair work we do in Provo, and four of them are usually symptoms of something other than the fireplace itself.

Draft is a pressure problem

A chimney pulls because the warm column of air inside it weighs less than the cold air outside. Anything that narrows that difference, or offers the house an easier place to draw air from, will make a perfectly sound fireplace spill smoke.

Two local factors make this common. The first is the winter inversion: when valley air sits cold, dense and motionless for a week at a time, the pressure difference the flue depends on is at its weakest of the year. The second is remodeling. A great deal of housing here has been tightened up over the decades with new windows, sealed rim joists and added insulation, and a house that no longer leaks has nowhere to find combustion air except back down the chimney. Run a range hood or a bathroom fan at the same time and you have built a competition the fireplace loses.

We test for that before quoting parts. Often the answer is a make-up air path, or a flue that was always undersized for the opening, rather than a repair to the appliance at all.

The older fireboxes in town

Mid-century fireplaces around here were built wide and shallow. They throw heat into the room well and they draft poorly, which is a trade the original builders made deliberately. Add a damper plate that has warped out of its seat and firebrick joints that have lost their mortar, and you get a fireplace that smokes on lighting and quietly vents heated air out of the house all summer. Fresh refractory joints and a top-sealing damper fix most of that without touching the masonry.

Houses that change hands often

A lot of properties in this city turn over every year, which means a hearth is regularly operated by somebody who inherited it without instructions. We find dampers forced past their stops, gas keys left cracked open, factory panels split by oversized loads, and glass doors run closed during a wood fire when the doors were never rated for it. If you have just taken on a property and do not know the hearth's history, have it looked at before the first cold night rather than during it.