Does your chimney have a cap?

Having a chimney cap on your chimney is an absolute necessity. Why?

Well, it’s pretty simple, really; when you burn fires, a certain amount of smoke will cling to the walls of your flue, called creosote. Creosote on its own, although highly flammable once it’s in large quantities, won’t harm your chimney, but once creosote mixes with water, it becomes highly acidic. Then it begins to eat away at the silica inside your mortar joints.

The mortar joints are the cement product that holds your chimney flue together. Once the silica or the bonding agent is gone from these joints, the mortar reverts to sand; once that’s happened, it’s only a matter of time before it’s going to fall out and deteriorate.

Once you’ve lost the mortar between your terracotta flue tiles, you open yourself to some scary scenarios. First, burning wood creates carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and a few other gasses simultaneously. Usually, this isn’t an issue when your fireplace is working correctly, but since you didn’t have a cap installed, those gasses are free to leave your flue and possibly enter other parts of your home.

Additionally, your chimney cap keeps out unwanted guests, leaves, sticks, and other unwanted debris. Thus making sure that you don’t wake up with a squirrel or racoon in your chimney.

We can get a chimney cap for any shape or size chimney, and we offer warranties on all chimney caps that we install. We are experts at looking for damage if you just noticed you haven’t had a cap on for some time.

ARC Chimney Sweeps also can get custom chimney caps made in an assortment of metals, colors, and designs.