What Gets Repaired on a Vineyard Chimney

It is worth being direct about this rather than writing a page about tuckpointing that will not describe your house. Vineyard is new. The tall brick stack with clay tile inside it belongs to an earlier era of building, and while we do that work every week elsewhere in Utah County, here it is the exception.

The chase, the cover and the collar

What most homes here have is a framed and sided chase enclosing a factory-built fireplace and its metal flue. The top is closed off with a sheet metal chase cover, and the flue passes through it with a storm collar sealing the penetration. That assembly is where nearly all the trouble starts. A flat cover with no cross-break holds water in the middle rather than shedding it. Held water rusts galvanized steel from the inside of a puddle outward. Once it perforates, everything it collects runs down inside the chase onto framing and insulation that nobody can see, and the first symptom is a stain on a ceiling below or a smell that appears in spring.

The repair is a stainless replacement, formed with a slope so water leaves, with a properly fitted and sealed storm collar. It is a straightforward job and it lasts.

Flashing and the siding line

Where the chase meets the roof, a step and counter flashing detail keeps water out. Sealant does not. We see chases where a previous repair was a heavy bead of caulk over a flashing gap, which holds for a season or two and then splits, and now water is entering behind a repair that looks like it was addressed. Replacing the flashing properly is the fix.

The metal liner itself

Factory-built chimney sections are engineered assemblies with specific clearances and locking joints. They corrode, they can be disturbed by roof work or by an animal, and joints separate. A separated joint on a wood-burning unit is a serious defect because it can let heat and combustion products into the chase. We replace sections with listed components from the same system rather than mixing manufacturers, because mixed components are not a tested assembly and are not a legitimate repair.

The masonry that does exist

Where there is real brickwork here, it takes the same freeze-thaw punishment as anywhere else in the valley, with the added factor of a low, damp lake plain that keeps masonry wetter going into a freeze. Crowns, joints and flashing get repaired the conventional way, and we match mortar strength to the existing brick rather than defaulting to the hardest mix.