Chimney Care Company's Blog

Schedule your mess-free sweeping with us today!

If you have a fireplace or chimney, you likely know the importance of having your chimney swept and inspected at least once per year. This lowers your home’s risk of a dangerous fire and other risks. Some homeowners dread the mess of a chimney sweeping. Fireplaces are dirty places, filled with soot and ash, but a chimney sweeping shouldn’t be messy! At Chimney Care Co., we pride ourselves in providing mess-free chimney sweepings. When our team is finished cleaning your fireplace, your will find your home even cleaner than before!

Chimney Care Co – chimney sweeping

When our team arrives in your home, we protect your flooring and furnishings with drop cloths and tarps. Our first concerns upon entering a home is to not cause any mess or damage to the flooring or furniture. We do this by protecting your furniture and flooring with drop cloths and tarps so that any stray soot or dust doesn’t land on any of your furniture or floor. If any furniture is at risk for being dirtied or damaged by our work, we will move it safely out of the way.

We use high-powered brushes

Once your flooring and furniture are protected from stray mess from our chimney sweeping, it’s time to get to work. To effectively and efficiently remove the creosote and soot from your chimney walls without create an excess of dust, we use high-powered rotating brushes that quickly loosen the buildup on the inside of your chimney walls.

We clear away mess with commercial vacuums

So where does the dust and mess from your chimney sweeping go? At the Chimney Care Co., we use high-powered, commercial-grade vacuums to clear away the debris caused by the chimney sweeping. These vacuums effectively suck any creosote, dirt, and debris loosened by the high-powered chimney brushes, without allowing any dust to invade your home. With the mess trapped inside the vacuums, we take care of and dispose of the dirt, debris, and creosote, once we are finished with the sweeping.

We clean up remaining mess before we leave

Once we’re done with the sweeping and inspection, we collect our drop cloths and tarps and replace any furniture that we were moved. If any soot or dust found its way into your home, we’ll clean it all up. Our goal is to leave your house looking just as clean as when we found it.
 
A professional chimney sweeping is crucial to keep your home and family safe from the dangers of a chimney fire — Don’t let the fear of a mess keep you from getting one. Call Chimney Care Co. to schedule your mess-free chimney sweeping today!

Chimney Health Hazards You Should Know About

Fireplaces are warm and cozy, and it’s easy to understand why the hearth often serves as the heart of the home. Unfortunately, the reality of fireplaces is that they aren’t always the ideal feature for a healthy home. There are some chimney health hazards you should know about.

Some chimney health hazards include:

• Particle inhalation.
  When you burn a fire in your open-hearth fireplace, fine particles are released into the air within your home. These fine particles can make eyes burn and itch, noses run and cause lung infections like bronchitis. Regular, long-term exposure to the particles from wood-burning fires can lead to lung diseases. The health risk is greater for small children, the elderly and people with chronic lung conditions.
• Creosote exposure.
  Each time a fire burns, creosote builds up within the chimney. That creosote can become a hazard if it breaks free and begins to flake into the fireplace and find its way into your home. Creosote can irritate skin, the eyes and the lungs. Chronic, long-term exposure can lead to organ damage.
• Carbon monoxide poisoning.
  When a chimney becomes clogged, carbon monoxide from your fireplace can’t exit your home, and the levels of carbon monoxide in your home can build up to dangerous levels. Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause faintness, dizziness, nausea, confusion, organ damage and even death.
• Disease exposure.
  Birds and bats often find their ways into chimneys and leave behind their droppings. These droppings contain a variety of bacteria. Cleaning bird droppings from your fireplace is especially dangerous because it sends the disease-causing spores airborne.

Health hazards associated with a chimney could be enough to scare any homeowner away from using their fireplace. However, you don’t need to go to extremes to keep you and your family healthy. There are several ways to protect your family from chimney-related health hazards.

To mitigate chimney health hazards:

• Have your chimney swept at least once per year.
  When it comes to operating a chimney safely, keeping your chimney clean has the greatest impact. A clean chimney drafts more efficiently, drawing smoke and fine particles away from your home more effectively. A chimney sweeping also removes dangerous creosote, any chimney clogs that could prevent carbon monoxide from being vented and disease-carrying bird droppings or other animal waste.
• Upgrade your appliance.
  There are other options to warm your hearth in a healthier way. You could install gas logs or a gas insert in your open-hearth fireplace. Gas burns hotter and more cleanly, reducing the amount of pollution released into your home. If you love the look of burning wood, you could consider an EPA-certified wood-burning insert, which creates less particulate matter and creates a barrier between the fire and your home.
• Burn only dry, seasoned firewood.
  Dry, seasoned firewood burns hotter and more cleanly. That means less pollution released into your home and a slower creosote buildup within your chimney.
• Install a chimney cap.
  A chimney cap can keep birds, bats, animals, and the diseases they carry, out of your chimney.

If you’re looking to reduce chimney health hazards in your home, call The Chimney Care Co!

Whether you need to have your chimney swept, want to upgrade your appliance, or are in need of a chimney cap to keep critters out, we can help!

Getting Optimum Draft

Your Chimney’s Draft, And How It Can Be Compromised

As comprehensive chimney and fireplace service professionals, the techs at the Chimney Care Co. tend to talk about draft a lot — it’s pretty much the key to your chimney’s proper function, so maintaining draft is key to what we do, too.

The Chimney Safety Institute of America has a detailed breakdown of the science behind how your chimney works, but if you want the chimney draft CliffsNotes, here’s a simple breakdown.

Not only does optimum draft increase effectiveness and performance, it also minimizes risks.

Draft is, more or less, how air draws up your flue. And it occurs because of a difference in pressure between the hot air produced by your fire and the cooler air outside your flue. When heated air is getting produced by your fire, some degree of draft will happen, but what you really need is optimum draft — the proper level of upward pull, which happens when your chimney system is properly built, in top shape, under optimum burning conditions.

That probably sounds like a tall order, all those optimums. But that’s what we do at the Chimney Care Co.: We use the right methods, tools and expertise to get your chimney system set up for optimum draft.

What Can Stop Optimum Draft?

Ensuring optimum draft means getting rid of all the things that hinder draft. Wondering what those things are? Here are a few of the most common problems:

Blockages

This one’s kind of a given: If something is blocking off your flue, air can’t flow like it should. The most common flue blockages are usually an indication of another problem, like a missing chimney cap allowing animals to nest in the chimney, pieces of a damaged chimney liner falling into the flue, or excess amounts of creosote being present because of an overdue chimney sweeping  appointment.

Improperly Sized Flue

Heating appliances are designed to vent through a specifically sized flue. A flue that’s too small leaves you with weak draft and smoking issues. A flue that’s too large generally draws too slowly leading to poor venting, increased levels of creosote and often liner and masonry damage from acidic condensate, too. The mismatch in sizes sometimes happens when a new appliance is installed to vent with an existing chimney, and the flue size isn’t taken into consideration. The most effective solution: having a new stainless steel flue liner installed to bring the flue to its proper size.

Your Appliance Isn’t Getting Enough Air

Fireplaces and stoves need combustion air to encourage draft and keep byproducts and smoke moving in the right direction. If you’re having issues with smoke coming into your living area and your home has energy-efficient windows and doors, those energy savers might be keeping your fire from getting enough air. Try cracking a window and see if it helps.

You’re Using The Wrong Fuel

If you have a wood-burning appliance, here’s one rule that has no exception: Burn seasoned or kiln-dried wood, always. Burning improperly dried wood leads to a fire that doesn’t burn hot enough, which means a weak draft and increased creosote. If you’re collecting and cutting your own wood, let it dry for six months to a year. (Christmas trees and trash: also a no-no as far as proper fireplace or stove use goes.)

If you’re experiencing draft issues, The Chimney Care Co. technicians can inspect your system, find the culprit and offer solutions. If you’d like to schedule an appointment, or ask any questions, just give us a call!