Gas Fireplace Service in Artesia, CA

Gas Fireplace Service 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.

Gas is now the majority of what burns in Los Angeles County fireplaces, and it has quietly become the part of the trade with the least maintenance attention. People believe a gas fireplace is maintenance-free because there is no ash to sweep. In reality gas produces roughly a gallon of water vapour for every hundred thousand BTU, and that moisture condenses inside the flue and rusts dampers, liners and fireboxes from the inside. Then there is the log set itself. Ceramic logs are positioned by the manufacturer to specific coordinates, and a set that has been rearranged by a housekeeper, a previous owner or a well-meaning relative will burn with flame impingement and produce carbon monoxide and soot. We find rearranged log sets constantly. Add pilot assemblies clogged with fifteen years of dust in a dry, dusty basin climate, and thermocouples at the end of their life, and most gas fireplaces here are overdue rather than fine.