Gas Fireplace Service in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Gas Fireplace Service 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.

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.