Which One Do You Actually Need?
Most calls sort into four situations, and they have different seasons - which is the useful
thing to know before you pick up the phone.
If you burn wood or pellets and it has been a year, you want a
sweep. That is autumn work, it includes a Level 1 inspection
anyway, and the inspection is what sets your interval for next year instead of a rule of thumb.
Under a ponderosa canopy it is also the visit that finds a summer's worth of needles in the
flue.
If the masonry is stained, the crown is cracked, or nobody has ever sealed the chimney, you
want waterproofing and crown repair - and you want it in
May or June. Everything in that job needs a dry surface and cure time, so it cannot be done
during the monsoon and cannot be done in winter at all. This is the service that decides whether
you are eventually paying for a liner.
And if the stove eats fuel, glazes its glass within a week, or shuts down with an error code,
that is stove service. Pellet appliances need it annually because
they are machines with moving parts; wood stoves need it when the gaskets go. Worth knowing:
draft complaints are usually not the appliance, and we measure before anyone proposes buying a
part.
And if you dropped an insert or a stove into an old open fireplace, or the stove has never
drafted right since the day it went in, that is relining. This
is the expensive one, so the honest version is worth stating: most of what we line is not
damaged at all, it is correctly built and simply four times too wide for the appliance now
connected to it. A sound clay flue serving the open fire it was sized for does not need lining,
and we will tell you that too.
If your situation is none of those, describe it. We would rather answer a question free than
sell the wrong service.
