Fireplace and Chimney Service in Riverton

The chase is the part that fails

What reads from the street as a brick or stucco chimney on a house out here is usually a wood-framed box with siding on it, and the real chimney is a double or triple-wall steel pipe running up the middle of it. That construction is entirely sound as long as it stays watertight, and it gives way at the joints where the building meets the weather: the flashing where the chase meets the roof, the corners of the chase cover, and the seal around the flue penetration. Water past any of those runs down inside the cavity, out of sight, until the drywall next to the firebox starts to stain.

Everything on one of these is a matched part

A factory-built fireplace is a listed appliance, which means the cap, the chase cover, the refractory panels, the glass and the blower are components of that appliance rather than generic hardware. A cap of the wrong dimensions changes how the whole system drafts, and a universal panel cut down to fit is not the panel the unit was tested with. That is why the first thing we do is read the model and listing plate inside the firebox. It settles what can legitimately be fitted and whether the parts are still manufactured.

Age deserves saying plainly. Many of these units are twenty to thirty winters old now. Some are perfectly serviceable and want a gasket, a panel and a clean. Others have reached the point where the sensible money goes into a replacement insert instead of hunting parts for a discontinued model, and we would rather tell you that than sell a repair that buys one more season.

One thing about how these hearths get used matters as well. A great many of them are direct-vent gas, lit for an hour on a cold evening and otherwise ignored, and that light duty is exactly why they get forgotten. The glass gasket hardens, the pilot assembly collects debris, and the outside terminal goes three seasons without anybody looking at it. We are licensed and insured, and we photograph the roof and the terminal, because on this kind of chimney almost everything worth seeing is somewhere you are not.