Gas Fireplace Service in Long Beach, CA

Gas Fireplace Service 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.

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.