Chimney Caps and Crowns in Artesia, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Artesia Homeowners

Artesia is barely two square miles and it keeps the shape of the Dutch dairy town it was before the tracts arrived. There is an older core of modest early houses, a good deal of 1950s infill, and the Pioneer Boulevard commercial strip that gives the city its present character. For our purposes Artesia is a city of small, plain masonry chimneys that have had very little attention. These are not elaborate stacks, and that works in an owner's favour: repairs here tend to be modest and affordable when they are caught. The problem is that a small chimney on a small house is exactly the one nobody thinks about, so we frequently arrive to find a flue that has never been swept, no cap, and a decade of nesting material sitting on the smoke shelf. The other Artesia pattern is multi-generational households and rental property, where the person burning fires is not the person who would arrange maintenance. If a fireplace in Artesia is being used at all, an inspection is worth doing before the first cold week.

A small dairy-town core with 1950s infill, modest masonry stacks, and a high rate of never-swept, uncapped flues.

An uncapped flue in Los Angeles County is an open pipe into your house, and it fills up. We pull nesting material out of chimneys here in every month of the year, because the birds and roof rats never get a winter off. The other thing an open flue takes is rain, straight down onto the damper and the smoke shelf, which is why so many dampers in this county are rusted solid. The crown matters just as much and gets thought about far less. A crown is meant to be a sloped, reinforced slab with an overhang and a drip edge that throws water clear of the brick. What most houses actually have is a flat trowelled smear of ordinary mortar, which cracks within a decade and then funnels water into the top of the stack. There is a fire dimension too: in the hillside and canyon parts of this county a spark arrestor screen is not optional, and a great many older chimneys either never had one or have one that has rusted through.