Chimney Sweep in Sherman Oaks, Even When the Flue Has Burned

After a chimney fire the deposit inside the flue is not ordinary soot. Creosote that has caught fire swells into a puffy, honeycombed crust, gray or silver, and pieces of it usually drop into the firebox, onto the roof or into the yard. It is lighter than it looks and crumbles under a brush, which makes some owners think the cleanup will be quick. Underneath that crust there is often a layer that never burned, a hard black glaze close to the damper where the smoke ran coolest. So the order matters. We lay drop cloths from the door to the hearth, seal the fireplace opening, and start the vacuum before any brush goes up, so the fine ash stays out of the house. Then we clear the flue from the top down, collect the burned material in bags, and keep a sample photo of it. The point of a sweep after a fire is not only a clean chimney. It is a clean surface, because a camera cannot judge a flue tile it cannot see.

That is why, in Sherman Oaks, a sweep after a fire is the first half of a two-part visit. The sweep, from $225, clears the loose and burned material. Then the camera goes down to look for split or shifted tiles, open mortar joints, and heat marks on the damper and smoke chamber. If the fire was small and the liner held, you may hear that the fireplace is fine once the damper or cap is sorted. If tiles cracked, we stop there and write up what the repair needs before anything else happens. Either way you keep photos from before and after cleaning, which matter if an insurer later asks what the flue looked like that day. Ordinary yearly sweeps follow the same steps, without the burned crust.

Leave the fireplace alone. Do not light a small fire to test the draft, and do not shovel out the firebox. The debris on the hearth tells us how hot the fire ran and how far up it went, so it is worth more where it fell. Close the glass doors or the screen. Close the damper only if it still moves freely; if it sticks, leave it where it is. Keep pets and children out of the room, because creosote flakes and fine ash track everywhere and the smell lingers. If smoke came through a wall, a ceiling or the attic during the fire, say so when you call, because that points to a breach in the chimney and we bring the camera for that first. Write down what you heard and saw, such as a roar like a train, popping, or a hot smell outside, and roughly when. Phone photos of the roof and yard, taken before anything is cleaned up, help us and help a claim.

When you book in Sherman Oaks or elsewhere in the San Fernando & Conejo Valley, we ask four questions: when the fire happened, whether the fire department came, whether anyone has used the fireplace since, and what fuel you burn. The answers set the length of the visit. A wood fireplace after a flue fire takes longer than a yearly sweep, and a gas unit that only shed soot onto its glass is usually short. Keep any paperwork the fire department left. If you plan to file a claim, call your insurer before the sweep so they can decide whether an adjuster wants to see the flue as it is. We can hold the visit a day for that, and we can start as soon as the adjuster says go.