Chimney Caps and Crowns in Pico Rivera, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Pico Rivera Homeowners

Pico Rivera sits between the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers, and that position defines the work. The city formed from the Pico and Rivera communities and built out heavily in the 1950s as families moved into the tracts on the old ranch land. Two local factors matter for chimneys. The first is groundwater and the river bottom soils: ground moisture here is higher than in the drier tracts to the south, and persistently damp footings under a heavy masonry stack encourage rising damp and salt bloom in the lower brickwork, which we find on the chimney breast inside houses as often as outside. The second is the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, whose epicentre was effectively next door. Pico Rivera took real masonry damage in that event, and as in Whittier a good deal of it was repaired at the surface without anyone examining the flue liner. Between damp working from the bottom and old shear cracks left from the top, a camera survey tells you far more here than an exterior look ever will.

River-bottom soils and high ground moisture, plus unresolved 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake damage in 1950s masonry.

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.