Chimney Sweeping in Long Beach, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Long Beach Homeowners

Long Beach gives us more variety in a single city than the rest of our service area combined. Belmont Heights, Rose Park and the Craftsman streets around Bluff Park went up in the 1910s and 1920s, and a great many of those chimneys were built with no flue liner at all — brick straight against brick, exactly as it was done at the time. Bixby Knolls and California Heights follow in the 1930s and 1940s with terracotta tile, and Los Altos and the east side are postwar tract work with lighter stacks. What connects all of it is the harbour. Salt air coming off the water drives chloride into mortar joints and eats galvanised caps, dampers and flashing at a rate you simply do not see fifteen miles inland. We replace more rusted-through caps in Long Beach than anywhere else we work. The historic district overlays in Belmont Heights and Bluff Park also mean visible exterior masonry work can need design review, which is worth knowing before the scaffolding goes up rather than after.

Unlined 1920s brick near the shore, postwar tile-lined stacks inland, and salt-air corrosion on caps and dampers throughout.

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.