Chimney Relining in Pico Rivera, CA

Chimney Relining 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.

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.