Chimney Sweeping in Cerritos, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Cerritos Homeowners

Cerritos is the most uniform housing stock we work in, and that makes it easy to predict. This was Dairy Valley until 1967, and what replaced the dairies was two decades of continuous tract building through to the mid-eighties. The consequence for us is that Cerritos is factory-built country. The great majority of these fireplaces are prefabricated metal units venting through a Class A metal chimney inside a framed and stuccoed chase, not full masonry. They fail completely differently. There is no mortar to repoint and no crown to recast; instead there is a galvanised sheet chase cover on top, and after forty years those have almost universally rusted, ponded and started leaking straight down inside the chase where nobody can see it. The water then rots the framing and corrodes the chimney sections. We replace a great many chase covers in stainless here. The other Cerritos issue is age of appliance: a 1978 factory-built firebox has a service life, and refractory panels that have cracked through are not repairable by patching.

1965-1985 tract housing, predominantly factory-built fireboxes in stuccoed chases with rusting galvanised chase covers.

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.