About Us

Sometimes the honest answer is no. We've opened a chase on a 1980s prefab and found a firebox with cracked refractory panels and a rusted-through chase cover, and the fix costs more than the unit is worth. We say that out loud instead of selling a sweep on top of it. Same goes the other direction: plenty of Santa Barbara households burn four or five fires a winter, and when we get the camera up the flue there's almost nothing on the walls. We tell those people their chimney doesn't need sweeping yet, write down what we saw, and charge for the visit we made rather than work that wasn't needed. A glazed, hardened deposit that won't come off with rods and brushes gets named as what it is, too. We don't pretend a brush fixed it.

Across the Santa Barbara County South Coast, the calls split by the age of the house. Older Spanish Revival and Craftsman homes carry original unlined or clay-tile-lined masonry chimneys, many stucco-clad over brick, built well before modern clearance and liner standards, and the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake and later seismic events have left cracked crowns, spalled mortar joints and displaced flue tiles in some of the oldest stacks. Postwar tracts run simple brick fireboxes with single-wide dampers. From the 1980s on it's mostly factory-built metal fireboxes with Class A double-wall chimneys hidden in framed, stucco or siding-wrapped chases. Light, seasonal use means slow creosote accumulation but long idle periods, so what we actually pull out is nesting birds, rodents and wasp nests, and what we actually find is spalled crowns and rusted-out spark arrestors. Marine layer and salt-laden air corrode galvanized caps, chase covers and flashing along the whole coastal strip, and winter atmospheric-river rain turns a failed crown seal or tired flashing into interior water staining above the mantel. Those stain calls come in every January. Plenty of households here have already converted to sealed gas log sets or direct-vent inserts because of Santa Barbara County APCD curtailment advisories on poor dispersion days, and those still need annual inspection for blocked flues, animal nesting and vent corrosion even though they make no creosote.

On site we bring drop cloths, a sealed vacuum, a full rod-and-brush set sized to your flue, and a camera to look up the liner so you see what we see. For gas work we bring manometers, combustion tools and the parts to service Heatilator, Heat & Glo, Majestic, Napoleon, Superior and Empire units. We work on open masonry fireplaces, sealed gas inserts and factory-built prefabs, and we handle sweeping, inspection, caps, liners, flues, fireboxes, chimney repair and gas fireplace repair. We do not do masonry or brickwork; if your crown or mortar joints need rebuilding we'll tell you and point you to a mason. On cost, the sweep itself is the predictable part. What moves it is access, mostly: a steep tile roof or a tall stack on a hillside lot takes longer and safer setup than a single-story ranch. Two flues instead of one means two of everything. And a chimney that's been idle for years with a nest packed in it is a removal job before it's a sweeping job.