Chimney Caps and Crowns in Santa Fe Springs, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Santa Fe Springs Homeowners

Santa Fe Springs is unusual in being mostly industrial with residential neighbourhoods set into it, so the housing comes in distinct pockets rather than a continuous fabric. Around Heritage Park and the Clarke Estate there is genuine age and some fine early work; the Los Nietos area and the tracts to the south are largely 1950s. The city also has a long oil and industrial history, which shows up in two ways relevant to a chimney. The first is soil: portions of the city have been worked, filled and re-graded over a century, and settlement on made ground puts stress on rigid masonry stacks. The second is air. Heavy industry and truck routes deposit a persistent film on roofs and into open flues, and combined with the marine layer that produces the same dense mat on the smoke shelf we see in Paramount. Because residential streets here sit close to commercial buildings and yards, spark arrestor screens are worth taking seriously on any chimney where wood is actually burned.

Residential pockets within industrial land, settlement on made ground, and heavy airborne deposition into open 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.