Chimney Cleaning

Chimney Cleaning

When you call for chimney cleaning, you want somebody who knows your flue from your firebox, who’ll show up when he says he will, and who you can find again if something doesn’t look right. That’s what the Locally family delivers. Every chimney sweep we send carries the owner’s name on the truck, answers to a local address you can drive to, and backs the work with our 90-Day Done Right Promise in writing. One call, one guarantee, no runaround.

What’s Included

A proper chimney cleaning isn’t just brushing soot off the walls. Depending on what you burn, how often you use your fireplace, and what last winter left behind, the job changes. Here’s what our sweeps handle most days.

Standard Wood-Burning Fireplace Sweep

This is the bread-and-butter job. We run brushes up the flue to knock creosote loose, vacuum the smoke chamber and firebox, and inspect the liner for cracks or gaps that could let heat reach your framing. In homes that burn oak or hickory three or four nights a week through the season, we usually find a quarter-inch or more of buildup that needs coming out. We’ll show you what came out of your chimney before we pack up.

Gas Fireplace Cleaning and Inspection

Gas burns cleaner, but the logs get dusty, the ports clog with spider webs in summer, and the thermocouple drifts out of spec. We pull the logs, clean the burner assembly, check the pilot and safety shutoff, and test for carbon monoxide spillage with a digital meter. If your gas insert hasn’t been looked at in three years, you’re past due. The fix is usually simple; the risk of skipping it isn’t.

Pellet Stove Exhaust Cleaning

Pellet stoves run a forced exhaust that cakes ash and clinkers in the vent pipe, especially if you’re burning lower-grade fuel. We pull the venting, run flex rods through the horizontal and vertical sections, and clean the combustion chamber and ash traps. We’ll also check the auger and exhaust fan while we’re in there. These systems don’t forgive neglect; a blocked vent will shut you down on the coldest night of January.

Chimney Cap and Crown Repair

The cap keeps rain, squirrels, and chimney swifts out of your flue. The crown is the concrete slab that seals the top of your brickwork. When either one fails, water gets in, freezes, and opens cracks you can’t see from the ground. We install stainless and copper caps from Gelco and Famco, and we pour new crowns or apply HeatShield crown seal when the concrete is sound but the surface is cracked. A dry chimney is a safe chimney.

Fireplace Smoke Chamber Parging

The smoke chamber is the upside-down funnel above your firebox, and most builders left it corbeled brick with mortar joints exposed. That rough surface traps creosote and slows draft. We parge smooth with Chamber Tech 2000 or similar refractory mortar so smoke turns the corner and heads up the flue instead of lingering. If you’ve ever had smoke roll out the front when you open the glass doors, this is likely why.

Dryer Vent Cleaning

Not a chimney, but the same lint that chokes dryer vents starts house fires every year, and most homeowners never think to clean them. We run a rotary brush and high-pressure blower through the duct from both ends, measure airflow before and after, and reattach everything with proper foil tape, not that flammable plastic flex. If your dryer takes two cycles to dry a load, this is probably the fix.

Why Homeowners Choose the Locally Family

We didn’t start with a business plan. We started with a retired county extension agent named Ward Selby who got tired of hearing the same story from neighbors: out-of-state plates, a quote that tripled at the door, and a phone number that stopped working the week after. In 1997 he wrote down what you could actually verify in five minutes: a local phone number a person answers, an address you can drive to, the owner’s name and face, and a license number you can look up. Any company that would publish all four could carry his name. That list is still the entire standard.

Top Hat Chimney joined that family in 1999, and Wendell has been sweeping the same chimneys ever since. He’s not a franchise that rotated in last spring. He publishes his license number, answers his own phone around the clock, and stamps a 90-Day Done Right Promise on every job. If it’s not done right, one call brings him back. No voicemail tree, no call center, no “we’ll have dispatch call you tomorrow.” The price he says on the phone is the price on the invoice, and he puts it in writing before a tool comes off the truck. Wendell lives twenty minutes from most of his customers. He’ll see you again at the hardware store on Saturday, which is the oldest accountability mechanism there is.

Frequently Asked Questions