Chimney Sweeping in Torrance, CA

Chimney Sweeping for Torrance Homeowners

Torrance covers more chimney history than any other city on our list except Long Beach. Old Torrance was laid out in 1912 to an Olmsted brothers plan as a planned industrial town, and the brick houses that survive from that period are among the oldest structures we work on. Then come the enormous postwar tracts of the 1950s that filled the centre of the city, and the Hollywood Riviera and Walteria on the coastal side. The Riviera is where the work changes character: those properties take direct marine exposure, and the combination of salt air and near-constant humidity is hard on everything ferrous at the top of a chimney. We replace corroded caps, chase covers and flashing there constantly. Inland, in Southwood and the central tracts, the issue is more ordinary — 1950s crowns that were never more than a mortar wash, now cracked through. The Old Torrance brick is the interesting end of it, frequently unlined or lightly lined, and worth a camera survey before anyone lights a fire in it.

1912 Olmsted-planned brick in Old Torrance, 1950s tract crowns, and direct marine exposure in the Hollywood Riviera.

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.