Chimney Relining in Whittier, CA

Chimney Relining for Whittier Homeowners

Whittier has the oldest and best housing stock in our service area and, for a chimney company, the most consequential recent history. Uptown and the streets around Whittier College carry Craftsman and early brick houses from the 1900s and 1910s, much of it unlined. Then there is the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. That event did enormous damage to unreinforced masonry here, and a great deal of it was repaired cosmetically — the visible crack pointed up, the stack left standing, the flue inside never examined. We still find the consequences on camera nearly forty years later: shear cracks running through terracotta liners in houses whose owners have no idea anything is wrong, because from the hearth it looks fine. Up in Friendly Hills and College Hills the picture is different again, with 1960s and 1970s hillside houses, tall exposed stacks catching wind off the ridge, and access that frequently needs planning. If you own pre-1960 brick in Whittier and it has not had a camera survey, that is the single thing worth doing.

Pre-1930 unlined brick in Uptown, unresolved 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake damage, and exposed hillside stacks in Friendly Hills.

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.