Chimney Caps and Crowns in Torrance, CA

Chimney Caps and Crowns for Torrance Homeowners

Torrance covers more chimney history than any other city on our list except Long Beach. Old Torrance was laid out in 1912 to an Olmsted brothers plan as a planned industrial town, and the brick houses that survive from that period are among the oldest structures we work on. Then come the enormous postwar tracts of the 1950s that filled the centre of the city, and the Hollywood Riviera and Walteria on the coastal side. The Riviera is where the work changes character: those properties take direct marine exposure, and the combination of salt air and near-constant humidity is hard on everything ferrous at the top of a chimney. We replace corroded caps, chase covers and flashing there constantly. Inland, in Southwood and the central tracts, the issue is more ordinary — 1950s crowns that were never more than a mortar wash, now cracked through. The Old Torrance brick is the interesting end of it, frequently unlined or lightly lined, and worth a camera survey before anyone lights a fire in it.

1912 Olmsted-planned brick in Old Torrance, 1950s tract crowns, and direct marine exposure in the Hollywood Riviera.

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.