Chimney Repair for Santaquin's Winters

Snow sits, and that is the problem

Rain leaves. Snow banks up against the uphill side of a chimney, packs into the angle where the stack meets the roof, and stays there for weeks. During the day the sun and the warm roof beneath melt the underside of that pack; overnight it refreezes. That cycle drives water into flashing laps, into any joint in the counter-flashing, and into the mortar bed under the bottom courses, at the one point on the chimney where the water has nowhere to drain to.

It is why the worst masonry damage on a Santaquin chimney is very often at the roofline rather than at the top, which is the opposite of what people expect and the opposite of where they look.

Ice dams push water uphill

Where a chimney interrupts a roof plane it also interrupts the flow of melting snow. Ice builds behind it, and water backing up behind an ice dam does not obey gravity in the way roofing assumes. It travels up under shingles and sideways into the wall. When people tell us the chimney leaks only during a thaw and never during a rainstorm, this is almost always the reason, and the repair is a flashing and roof-detail repair rather than a masonry one.

Elevation multiplies the freeze cycles

Higher ground crosses the freezing point more often, not just goes colder. A stack up on the benches will pass through freezing and back most days in the shoulder seasons, and every one of those crossings works on water already inside the brick. That is what turns hairline crazing into spalled faces and open joints over a decade, and it is why the same chimney design lasts longer down in the middle of the valley than it does here.

What good repair looks like

Flashing replaced properly, with step flashing woven into the courses and a counter-flashing let into a cut reglet rather than surface-caulked. A cast crown with an overhang and a bond break at the flue, not a troweled mortar wash. Repointing with a mix matched to the age of the masonry. And a saddle or cricket on the uphill side of a wide chimney, which is the single most effective thing anyone can do about the snow problem and the thing most often left off.

Sealant is a maintenance item, not a repair. If someone has caulked your flashing rather than replaced it, that is a clock running rather than a job finished.