Chimney Caps and Crowns in Bellflower, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Bellflower Homeowners

Bellflower is our closest neighbour of any size and one of the quickest calls we take, but the work has a character of its own. This is dense postwar housing on narrow lots, built out rapidly in the late 1940s and 1950s when the city was shifting from dairy and poultry land to suburb. The practical consequence is access. Setback distances are short, side yards are often under five feet, and a great many properties have added a rear unit or a garage conversion that occupies the space a ladder would ordinarily go. We plan roof access on Bellflower jobs before we quote them rather than discovering the problem on the day. The chimneys themselves are typically modest single-flue masonry stacks, tile-lined, serving a small firebox. Because the lots are tight, many of these stacks sit close to a neighbour's structure, which makes spark arrestors and sound crowns more than a formality. Deferred maintenance is the norm here rather than the exception, and open uncapped flues full of nesting material are common.

Dense late-1940s and 1950s tracts on narrow lots, tight roof access, and a high proportion of 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.