Chimney Caps and Crowns in La Mirada, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for La Mirada Homeowners

La Mirada was planned rather than accreted, laid out from the mid-1950s on the old Olive Ranch land with a consistency that still shows. Houses here tend to be better maintained than the county average and the roofs are in better condition, which changes what we find. Structural masonry failure is comparatively rare in La Mirada. What is not rare is an original 1960s flue that has never been swept and a homeowner who has, entirely reasonably, assumed a tidy house means a tidy chimney. We also see the consequences of the region's most common upgrade: a fireplace insert or a gas log set dropped into a masonry opening built for open wood burning, with no change to the flue. That mismatch is invisible and it matters, because a flue sized for an open fire runs far too cool for an insert or a gas appliance, condenses moisture inside itself and corrodes from within. La Mirada also has a good number of two-storey houses with tall slender stacks, where crown detail and cap fixing need doing properly because the wind loading at that height is real.

Well-maintained 1955-1970 planned tracts, original unswept flues, and inserts fitted into oversized masonry openings.

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.