Chimney Sweeping in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Rancho Palos Verdes Homeowners

Rancho Palos Verdes is the most demanding place we work and the one where a chimney is least likely to be ordinary. The housing is largely 1960s and 1970s custom and semi-custom hillside building, with tall architectural stacks on steeply pitched roofs, often exposed on three sides. Three local conditions drive everything. The first is marine exposure: fog, salt and wind coming straight off the water, which corrodes any ferrous metal at the top of a stack and keeps masonry damp far longer than it dries. The second is wind loading on those tall exposed chimneys, which is why caps here must be mechanically fixed rather than friction fitted. The third is ground movement, and it is not historical: the Portuguese Bend landslide complex is active, and in the affected areas structures are being sheared continuously rather than in single events. A chimney in a moving zone will crack again after it is repaired, and we would rather tell an owner that plainly than take money for a repair that will not hold.

Tall exposed 1960s-70s hillside stacks, heavy salt and fog corrosion, high wind loading, and active land movement at Portuguese Bend.

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.