Chimney Relining in Santa Fe Springs, CA

Chimney Relining 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.

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.