Chimney Cleaning

Johnson Chimney Service offers a wide range of safety and maintenance services to help care for your home. We inspect, clean, service and repair a number of areas vital to the structure or safety of your home. All chimneys should be inspected annually and swept when needed, to remove byproducts of combustion (such as soot and creosote), and to maintain draft so dangerous fumes can exit your home. Each cleaning also includes a safety inspection to reduce the risk of a chimney fire and insure proper conditions. 

Creosote & Chimney Fires

A dirty chimney with only a quarter inch of soot contains the highly flammable substance called creosote. A hot fire around 1000 degrees F. could easily ignite this substance into a roaring chimney fire. At the height of a chimney fire, the creosote can bum at temperatures exceeding 2000 degrees F. Flames and flying embers can easily land on the roof and ignite the wood framing of your home. The intense heat can cause the flue to crack or collapse thus causing the interior walls of your house to burst into flames.

Creosote in chimneys comes in several stages. In its flaky, soot form, it is easily brushed away leaving safe and clean flue walls. When it appears as hard, brittle deposits, the chimney sweep's extra efforts in brushing will remove most of the buildup. But the nasty glazed variety is truly the most dangerous form, and the most difficult to remove from your home's wood burning system. And until recently, glazed creosote was almost impossible to remove in many instances.

Glazed creosote in your chimney is recognizable by its dense, shiny tar-like appearance. This unpleasant substance is basically wood tar which has become baked onto the walls of the chimney or flue lining. Once it gets burning in your chimney, it is extremely difficult to extinguish.