Chimney Caps and Crowns in Cerritos, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Cerritos Homeowners

Cerritos is the most uniform housing stock we work in, and that makes it easy to predict. This was Dairy Valley until 1967, and what replaced the dairies was two decades of continuous tract building through to the mid-eighties. The consequence for us is that Cerritos is factory-built country. The great majority of these fireplaces are prefabricated metal units venting through a Class A metal chimney inside a framed and stuccoed chase, not full masonry. They fail completely differently. There is no mortar to repoint and no crown to recast; instead there is a galvanised sheet chase cover on top, and after forty years those have almost universally rusted, ponded and started leaking straight down inside the chase where nobody can see it. The water then rots the framing and corrodes the chimney sections. We replace a great many chase covers in stainless here. The other Cerritos issue is age of appliance: a 1978 factory-built firebox has a service life, and refractory panels that have cracked through are not repairable by patching.

1965-1985 tract housing, predominantly factory-built fireboxes in stuccoed chases with rusting galvanised chase covers.

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.