Chimney Caps and Crowns in Paramount, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Paramount Homeowners

Paramount took its present form in the years after the war, when the Hynes and Clearwater communities merged and the surrounding hay and dairy land filled in with housing. The result is a compact city of modest single-storey homes on regular lots, built between roughly 1946 and 1960. The chimneys are correspondingly plain: single-flue masonry, tile-lined, serving a small firebox that was standard specification rather than a feature. What makes Paramount distinctive for us is proximity to industry and the freeway corridor, which puts a steady load of airborne grit on every roof in the city. That matters more than people expect, because grit and dust settle into an open flue and combine with soot and moisture into a dense mat on the smoke shelf that a light sweep will not shift. We also see a lot of galvanised caps here that were fitted decades ago and have long since rusted through at the mesh, which is worse than no cap at all because the remaining frame holds debris in place.

Compact 1946-1960 housing near the freeway and industrial corridor, with grit-laden flues and rusted-through galvanised caps.

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.