Chimney Caps & Crown Repair
The cheapest repair on a chimney, and the one that prevents the expensive ones. A cap keeps water, animals and embers where they belong.
Inspection
Full Cleaning
✓ Free inspection included with every cleaning
The cap
A chimney cap is a stainless or copper hood with mesh sides that sits over the top of the flue. It does three jobs: it keeps rain out of the flue, it keeps animals and birds from nesting inside it, and its spark arrestor mesh keeps burning embers from landing on your roof.
An uncapped flue is an open pipe pointing at the sky. Every rainfall goes down it. On the wooded streets in Livingston and Wayne, so do squirrels and chimney swifts. A nest is a complete blockage sitting directly above your firebox, which means combustion gases have nowhere to go but back into the room.
The crown
The crown is the sloped slab at the very top of the chimney that covers the masonry around the flue. A properly built crown is cast concrete with a slope, an overhang past the brick, and a drip edge so water falls clear rather than running down the face.
Most chimneys built before about 1950 do not have one. They have a mortar wash — a thin skim of mortar troweled over the top — and mortar wash cracks. Once it cracks, water goes into the space between the flue liner and the brick, where nobody can see it, and freeze-thaw does the rest. A cracked crown is the single most common thing we photograph on inspections in Nutley and Montclair.
Chase covers
If you have a factory-built fireplace, the equivalent part is the chase cover — the metal lid on top of the framed chase. Older ones are galvanized steel and they rust through from the inside. When they do, water pours straight into the chase and rots the framing. We replace them in stainless so it does not happen twice. This is the most common repair we do in Livingston.
$49 means $49.
You have probably read that a cheap chimney offer is bait, and that the number changes once the technician is standing in your living room. That happens, and it is a fair thing to be wary of.
So here is our commitment in plain language. The price you booked is the price you pay for the inspection or the cleaning. Our technician does not arrive and rewrite it. If we find something that genuinely needs repair, you get photographs of the problem and a written price, and you are free to say no, think about it, or get two other quotes. Nobody will push you.
If your chimney is fine, our report will say so and we will go home. That is a normal outcome.
Book Chimney Cap & Crown
Flat pricing, photographs of everything we find, and no pressure to buy repairs.
Inspection
Full Cleaning
✓ Free inspection included with every cleaning
Book Your Visit
Or $99 for inspection plus a full cleaning.
Where we work