Chimney Relining in Long Beach, CA

Chimney Relining 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.

A liner is what stands between the fire and the timber framing of your house, and a large number of chimneys in this county do not have a working one. Anything built here before about 1930 — much of Old Torrance, Uptown Whittier, the Long Beach bungalow neighbourhoods — was commonly built with no liner at all, just brick against brick. Later houses got terracotta tile, which is sound until the ground moves, and the ground here moves. Cracked and displaced tiles are the single most common serious defect we find on camera. The other driver is appliance change. Every gas conversion, every wood stove and every fireplace insert changes the volume and the temperature of what the flue has to carry, and an original masonry flue is nearly always far too large for a modern appliance. An oversized flue runs cool, which condenses acidic moisture inside the chimney and destroys it from within faster than any fire would.