Chimney Inspections in Long Beach, CA

Chimney Inspections for Long Beach Homeowners

Long Beach gives us more variety in a single city than the rest of our service area combined. Belmont Heights, Rose Park and the Craftsman streets around Bluff Park went up in the 1910s and 1920s, and a great many of those chimneys were built with no flue liner at all — brick straight against brick, exactly as it was done at the time. Bixby Knolls and California Heights follow in the 1930s and 1940s with terracotta tile, and Los Altos and the east side are postwar tract work with lighter stacks. What connects all of it is the harbour. Salt air coming off the water drives chloride into mortar joints and eats galvanised caps, dampers and flashing at a rate you simply do not see fifteen miles inland. We replace more rusted-through caps in Long Beach than anywhere else we work. The historic district overlays in Belmont Heights and Bluff Park also mean visible exterior masonry work can need design review, which is worth knowing before the scaffolding goes up rather than after.

Unlined 1920s brick near the shore, postwar tile-lined stacks inland, and salt-air corrosion on caps and dampers throughout.

An inspection is the only part of this trade that tells you something you could not otherwise know. A flue can look perfectly sound from the hearth and be cracked through two storeys up. That matters more here than in most of the country because of what the ground does. The 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake put hairline shears through masonry across the Whittier and Pico Rivera area that have quietly widened ever since, and the Portuguese Bend slide is still moving under parts of Rancho Palos Verdes today. Add the ordinary rate of settlement in the postwar tracts built on old dairy and farm land in Cerritos, Artesia and Norwalk, and cracked flue tiles are common in houses that have never had a bad fire. We also do a lot of point-of-sale work. A Level 2 inspection is what a lender, an insurer or a careful buyer's agent will ask for, and a written report with photographs settles the question rather than starting an argument.