Who We Are

The truck carries drop cloths, a HEPA vacuum, a rod-and-brush set in several head sizes, a flue camera, hand tools for dampers and caps, and a gas service kit with a manometer and combustion tools. The crew lays cloths from the door to the hearth before anything else, then seals the fireplace opening and runs the vacuum the whole time the brush is moving. Sweeping goes top-down or bottom-up depending on what the chimney is and what access the roof allows. After the brush work comes the camera, up the flue and into the smoke chamber, so you can see the liner, the tile joints, the damper, and whatever was living up there. On a gas unit the order flips: glass and logs out, burner and pilot cleaned, venting and spill checked, then the flue. We work on open masonry fireplaces, sealed direct-vent and gas log sets, and factory-built prefab systems, including Heatilator, Heat & Glo, Majestic, Napoleon, Superior and Empire. If the flue is clean and the camera shows nothing worth billing for, we say so and skip the sweep. That happens more often here than you would think.

Southern California burning is occasional, not survival heating. Most households light 10 to 40 fires a season between Thanksgiving and early March, which changes what inspections actually find. Low-volume, often damp or unseasoned wood plus short, cool burns produces glazed and flaky creosote faster than people assume. The long idle stretch from April to October is the other half of the problem: raccoon, squirrel, swift and bird nesting, bee and wasp colonies, and leaf and palm-frond debris packing the smoke chamber. Air-district no-burn days and Rule 445 pushed much of the basin to gas log sets and sealed inserts, and those still need annual flue, damper-stop, and spill and CO checks. A decorative gas log in a masonry fireplace with a blocked or closed-off flue is a carbon monoxide problem, not a creosote one, and it is a common call for us. Earthquake damage is the region's signature defect: offset crowns, cracked mortar joints, chimneys separated from the wall, shifted clay flue tiles, and pre-1930 chimneys that were never lined at all. Santa Ana events take out caps, crowns and flashing and push embers, so foothill and canyon properties need spark arrestors that meet code. On the coastal strip and in marine-layer zones, salt eats caps, chase covers and prefab metal pipe. Winter rain arrives as a handful of atmospheric river storms, so crown and flashing leaks show up as sudden ceiling staining rather than slow seepage. Early-season calls are nesting and debris. Post-storm calls are water.

We sweep, we inspect, and we handle caps, liners, flues, fireboxes and gas fireplace work. We do not do masonry or brickwork. If the camera shows cracked mortar joints or a chimney pulling away from the wall, we document it and tell you to bring in a mason, and we will tell you plainly whether it is urgent or something to watch. Start with a chimney inspection if you just bought the house, if you had a storm leak, or if you have not had anyone up there in years. From there we can quote chimney repair work like caps, chase covers and liners, or gas fireplace repair if the pilot drops, the glass is sooting, or the unit smells when it runs. On cost, a straight sweep on an open masonry fireplace you use a dozen times a year is the low end of our work. What moves the number is roof access, whether we have to work from a steep or tile roof, how much glazed creosote has to come off instead of loose soot, whether an animal nest has to be removed rather than brushed, and whether the job is gas service, which takes longer because the burner comes apart and goes back together.