Chimney rain caps save you money! One of the best preventative maintenance actions you can take is to have a rain cap installed on your chimney. The obvious advantages are keeping water and animals out of the interior of your chimney system. Chimney rain caps can also...
The right application for the job The right procedure for the right situation. How bad is the situation, and what do you want to achieve? The house was recently put on the market and the chimney had a beautiful paint job applied to the entire exterior. I had seen this...
The Top-Of-Chimney Replacement Damper So you have a damper that will not open or close, is rusted out or is non-existent. The economical solution is to have a top-closing damper installed. The economical way to replace a fireplace damper ...
Mortar joint damage from freeze-thaw cycles. Wet mortar being placed into prepared mortar joints Mantle tuckpointing restoration Completed tuckpoint repair More on tuckpointing It’s another beautiful day in Oregon and today we re-pointed another chimney. As you can...
You stand in your yard, coffee or beer in hand, and look up at your chimney. You can clearly see that there is loose mortar between the bricks, or that even some of the mortar joints have fallen out, and suddenly dollar signs are flashing in front of your eyes. You...
When the EPA started to crack down on wood stove emissions, the early technology utilized catalytic converters to help clean up the emissions from the stove. Over time these converters can become brittle. Sometimes it gets as bad as when the chimney sweep pulls it out...
A customer had called and wanted a bid to replace their entire chimney because it looked like this disaster.(click on photos to enlarge): We came up with a brilliant solution, which was to resurface the faces of the damaged block and paint the...
Chimney sweeps in Portland Oregon are having to deal less and less with un-lined woodstove inserts. Back in the ancient days wood stove inserts ( a wood stove that has been set into an open fireplace ) were not installed with a stainless steel liner being...
A spark arresting chimney rain cap installation is a smart move for several reasons. These caps are tight-fitting metal chimney caps that reduce spark output into the environment. They are made of galvanized steel, stainless steel, copper, etc. This year I have...
A chimney sweep’s brush vs chimney sweeping logs. Do these logs really clean the chimney? I have been cleaning chimneys for 30 years now, and I get this question asked of me several times each year. I cannot speak for the cleaning logs because I have not...
