The Town That Isn't Only Cabins
Show Low is the one place on our patch with a genuinely mixed housing stock, and that shows up in the work. There are year-round family homes on the flat that heat with propane and run a stove as backup. There are timber-and-stone houses up in the pines that burn wood in earnest. There is a growing band of newer subdivision housing where the fireplace is decorative and gets lit six times a winter. And because Show Low is the commercial centre of the mountain, there is more retirement and full-time housing here than in Pinetop.
The practical effect is that we cannot assume anything about a Show Low chimney before seeing it. In Pinetop the odds say cabin, class-A pipe, seasonal use. In Snowflake the odds say brick and a stove doing real work. Here the same street can hold all three, which is why we ask more questions on the phone about this town than about the other two.
What We Find Most Often
Crown deterioration, more than anything inside the flue. Show Low sits at 6,400 feet on relatively open ground, and its chimneys take the full monsoon and the full freeze-thaw cycle without the tree cover that shelters the Pinetop cabins slightly. Concrete crowns here age fast, and because the town has a lot of 1970s and 1980s building stock, a great many of them are now at the end of their service life all at once.
The second recurring find is a decorative fireplace being used as a heater. Somebody buys a house with an open masonry fireplace, decides to actually heat with it during a cold snap, and discovers that an open fireplace is a poor heater that eats wood and glazes a flue quickly. That is usually a conversation about an insert rather than a chimney repair, and we will say so even though we do not sell them.
Pellet Country
Show Low has more pellet appliances per house than anywhere else we work. Pellets are readily available in town, the fuel stores clean and dry in a garage, and for a house that is occupied all winter a pellet stove is genuinely less work than wood. It also means a large share of our service calls here are machine work - blowers, augers, control boards - rather than brush work. See stove service for what that involves.
Booking
Show Low is where the van is most days, so this is the one town where short-notice work is usually possible. September and October fill first for sweeping. Crown and waterproofing work goes in the May and June diary, because that is the only window where it can be done properly.
What we do in Show Low
Most of our routes
Show Low is where we are most days, so short-notice work is usually possible here when it is not elsewhere.
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