Fireplace & Chimney Safety
Two real risks, explained without the scare tactics: a chimney fire and carbon monoxide. Here is what actually causes each one and what to check before your first fire.
Inspection
Full Cleaning
✓ Free inspection included with every cleaning
Risk one: a chimney fire
A chimney fire is creosote burning inside the flue. Creosote is the tarry residue that wood smoke leaves on a cool flue wall, and it accumulates every time you burn. A serious chimney fire burns hot enough to crack a clay tile liner, and a cracked liner lets heat reach the framing that the chimney passes through.
What raises your risk: burning unseasoned or wet wood, burning often in a cold exterior flue, damping the fire down so it smolders rather than burns cleanly, and going years between sweeps. What lowers it: dry seasoned hardwood, hot clean fires, and getting the flue brushed before each season.
Risk two: carbon monoxide
This is the quieter one and, in the housing we work on, the more common one. Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odourless product of combustion. Your chimney's job is to carry it outside. If the flue is blocked — by a nest, by fallen liner tile, by decades of debris on the smoke shelf — it comes back into the house instead.
This is why we care so much about verifying appliance venting in Paterson, Belleville and the Ironbound. A furnace and a water heater improperly combined into an undersized flue, in an occupied three-family, is the most dangerous thing we routinely find.
Whatever you do about your chimney, put a working CO alarm on every level of the house. It costs about twenty dollars and it is the single most effective thing you can do.
Before you light the first fire
- Open the damper fully and check that it moves freely
- Look up with a flashlight for daylight and for obvious blockage
- Check outside for a cap on the flue
- Look for fallen debris on the smoke shelf
- Check your CO and smoke alarms
- Burn only seasoned, dry hardwood — never treated or painted wood
- If it has been more than a year, get the flue scanned before you burn
What we do not do
We do not tell people their chimney is about to burn their house down in order to sell a liner. The industry has a real problem with that, and it is the reason a lot of people distrust low advertised prices. If your chimney is safe, our report will say it is safe. If it is not, you will get photographs showing you exactly why.
$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 Fireplace & Safety
Flat pricing, photographs of everything we find, and no pressure to buy repairs.
Inspection
Full Cleaning
✓ Free inspection included with every cleaning
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Or $99 for inspection plus a full cleaning.
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