Chimney and Chase Repair for Riverton Properties

Where a chimney is a wood-framed box clad in siding, the things that go wrong are the things that go wrong with any exterior wall, plus a metal lid on top and a hot pipe running through the middle. That combination produces a particular set of faults, and they are worth naming plainly.

Chase repairs

• The chase cover. Original covers are often formed flat in galvanized steel, and once water stands on one, corrosion starts at the seams and fastener holes and works through. A stainless replacement, sloped so it drains and fitted with a sealed collar around the flue pipe, is a permanent fix rather than a patch.
• The storm collar and the flashing where the pipe passes the cover, which is a small detail that causes large leaks.
• Roof flashing at the base of the chase, particularly on the uphill side where a cricket should be diverting water around it.
• Rot in the framing and sheathing behind a leak, which is the reason to fix the cover before rather than after.

The limit on repairing a listed chimney

The metal chimney inside the chase is a certified assembly, and this is where honest work has to draw a line. Damaged sections of a listed chimney are replaced with matching listed sections, not with generic pipe that happens to fit. Nobody can patch a corroded liner, and nobody should splice a different manufacturer's parts into the run. If the chimney system is failing and the parts no longer exist, the answer is a full replacement of the system, and we will say so rather than improvise.

Masonry work on the older places

The farm properties and older homes among the subdivisions have real brick stacks, and those get conventional treatment: repointing failed joints with a mortar matched to the existing work, recasting cracked crowns with an overhang and drip edge, replacing spalled brick, and rebuilding from the roof line where the stack has lost too much to repoint. Exposure out here is a factor, since chimneys on open ground with little shelter take wind-driven rain on the windward face and dry unevenly.

Riverton sits at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, near enough to the gap at Point of the Mountain to get the wind that comes through it, and that is a fair part of why sealant, storm collars and step flashing on an exposed chase here give up earlier than they do on a sheltered street.

Finding the leak before pricing it

A stain on a ceiling near a chimney can come from the cover, the collar, the flashing, the crown, or the masonry itself, and they cost very different amounts to fix. We would rather spend the time isolating it than quote the most expensive possibility and hope.