Chimney Sweeping in Artesia, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Artesia Homeowners

Artesia is barely two square miles and it keeps the shape of the Dutch dairy town it was before the tracts arrived. There is an older core of modest early houses, a good deal of 1950s infill, and the Pioneer Boulevard commercial strip that gives the city its present character. For our purposes Artesia is a city of small, plain masonry chimneys that have had very little attention. These are not elaborate stacks, and that works in an owner's favour: repairs here tend to be modest and affordable when they are caught. The problem is that a small chimney on a small house is exactly the one nobody thinks about, so we frequently arrive to find a flue that has never been swept, no cap, and a decade of nesting material sitting on the smoke shelf. The other Artesia pattern is multi-generational households and rental property, where the person burning fires is not the person who would arrange maintenance. If a fireplace in Artesia is being used at all, an inspection is worth doing before the first cold week.

A small dairy-town core with 1950s infill, modest masonry stacks, and a high rate of never-swept, uncapped flues.

Almost nobody in Los Angeles County heats with a fireplace. People light ten or twenty fires a winter, on the handful of evenings that drop into the fifties, and assume that light use means no maintenance. It is precisely the wrong conclusion. Short, cool, smouldering fires never get the flue hot enough to carry volatiles out of the system, so they condense on the walls as glazed creosote — the hardest kind to remove and the easiest to ignite. Then there is the marine layer. From May through July the masonry here stays damp most mornings, and damp soot turns acidic and eats mortar joints from the inside where nobody looks. Add year-round bird and roof-rat activity and an uncapped flue that has sat open for a decade, and a great many chimneys in this county are carrying a season of nesting material on top of years of buildup.